This year's Emmy winner for best TV movie, HBO's A Lesson Before Dying, offers proof that the network takes its most audacious risks in the short form (The Sopranos, Oz, the brilliant Mr. Show) while saving bland, well-meaning pabulum as bait for conservative Academy voters. An exceptional ensemble breathes some life into this middlebrow adaptation of Ernest J. Gaines' novel, which examines the deep psychological scars inflicted by racism in the Deep South. Boogie Nights' Don Cheadle plays a college-educated teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in 1948 rural Louisiana who begins to question whether he's really making a difference in his students' lives. His resolve is further challenged when two local women, Cicely Tyson and Irma P. Hall, ask him to visit the town prison, where wrongly convicted Mekhi Phifer awaits the death penalty for killing a white liquor-store clerk. Demoralized by his lawyer's plea that a "poor, dumb hog" is not worth the electric chair, Phifer predictably resists Cheadle's intervention, then gradually learns the value of dying with dignity. Plenty of drearily didactic lessons are imparted on pride, faith, and family obligation, but A Lesson Before Dying hammers home ideas that only the most hardened racist would find disagreeable. Veteran director-for-hire Joseph Sargent—the culprit behind Jaws: The Revenge, the Crime And Punishment miniseries, and other travesties—is too bent on placating the viewer with dull homilies to confront the lasting traumas of black oppression. A Lesson Before Dying's sole, dubious achievement is twisting real human tragedy into treacly feel-good salve.