'Carrier' navigates deep waters

BY DIANE WERTS | Special to Newsday

April 27, 2008

A carrier landing is kind of like having sex during a car accident," says one Navy flier - and you know this isn't your grandfather's documentary.

The 10 hours of PBS' immersive miniseries "Carrier" (Sunday-Thursday 9 p.m. on WNET/13, Sunday (10:30 p.m.), Monday-Tuesday (11 p.m.) on WLIW/21) are frank and intimate, hard-hitting and heart-rending, rocking (with hit songs) and rolling (when the ship pitches so sharply, planes can't land).

It's unvarnished life on an aircraft carrier - a floating city of 5,000, from hotshot pilots flying $60 million planes to no-prospects deck-swabbers. Director Mayo Chermayoff and her four high-def crews, 17 people in all, spent six months on deployment with the U.S.S. Nimitz in 2005. Their no-narration portrait peeks at everybody/everything on board.

"One major element of agreement with the Navy from the very beginning," Chermayoff said by phone while traveling to promote this week's premiere, "was that we would have editorial control over the content and the editing of our material. And that we were going to be on the deployment without minders or observation [by higher-ups]. That they would allow us to embed ourselves and forge our own relationships."

Do they ever. Crew members, male and female, officers and enlisted, talk frankly about their duties, their politics, relationships, frustrations, screw-ups - even, in one gripping hour, about a rape investigation. Everyone involved opens up.

"We've entered a period in our history where kids see themselves on television, on the Internet, in Facebook, all the time," Chermayoff says, "and they're very used to that idea of sharing and communicating."

Crew members get gritty about their fractured families, their religious beliefs, their political doubts about the war in Iraq or their firm conviction that it's right. Among the enlisted crew, many joined the Navy as an escape or to look for themselves. "Carrier" catches that search.

"We had a story booth set up on the ship," says producer Jeff Dupre, "so a number of people came down and talked to us about all different kinds of things."

Those comments punctuate the ongoing tales of around 20 central "characters" (Chermayoff calls them "film participants") - an earnest Marine abandoned as a kid at a carnival, a no-apologies racist apparently trying to get kicked off ship, a female pilot who wishes they'd start dropping bombs, a lost soul whose pregnant girlfriend doesn't answer e-mails.

"Basically, what it is is a big -- floating high school," says one lowly sailor, setting the social scene. An officer provides this physical description: "We live beneath the runway of a major airport, on top of an ammo dump."

Put 'em together, and "Carrier" is fairly irresistible.