Substitutes Fall Short in Radner Tale

Gilda Radner won America’s heart first as a ragamuffin comedian, then as a warrior against cancer. Her life story should make for a wonderfully inspirational TV movie, yet the version of it told tonight in “Gilda Radner: It’s Always Something” (9 p.m., ABC) is surprisingly uninvolving.

Part of the problem is that so many of the participants in Radner’s story are well-known television and film personalities, from her colleagues in the original cast of “Saturday Night Live” to her second husband, Gene Wilder. This means that the actors portraying them have the doubly difficult task of perfecting impersonations, then layering on the emotions.

Jami Gertz as Radner and Tom Rooney as Wilder do a fair job of the impersonations, but the emotion too rarely filters through. This remoteness is still more pronounced among the supporting players. It’s like spending the entire movie among those roaming fake celebrities at the Universal Studios theme park.

As written by Janet Brownell and directed by Duane Clark, the story also suffers from what you might call a checklist approach. Beloved father dies of cancer? Check. Radner earns early acclaim at Toronto’s Second City comedy club? Check. Radner becomes part of a cultural phenomenon on “SNL”? Check.

And so on.

A handful of fantasy moments help to perk things up. Every face in an audience applauding one of Radner’s “SNL” skits becomes her father’s. During the grueling days of chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, she dreams of being interviewed by her Baba Wawa character.

Still, none of this packs the wallop of seeing the real Radner in a vintage clip at the film’s end. For more of this, tune in at 8 p.m. for the clip compilation “Gilda Radner’s Greatest Moments.”