I have a friend who thinks that Fred Schepisi – who directed “Empire Falls,” the HBO miniseries that begins tomorrow at 9 p.m. and ends, not a moment too soon, on Sunday – is the guy Hollywood calls when shooting is supposed to begin tomorrow and the person who was supposed to direct suddenly got a better gig. Maybe that’s not a fair description of the man who directed such great movies as “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” and “A Cry in the Dark,” but it does capture the essence of the filmmaker behind “Mr. Baseball” and, now, “Empire Falls.” There’s a strange mix of excess energy and terminal ennui in this adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo novel, and it can’t be blamed on a stellar cast that includes Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, and Ed Harris. (Well, maybe we can blame Ms. Hunt a little.)

Can you fault HBO for thinking that a novel about the tribulations of a blue-collar New England town would be worthy of a four-hour miniseries? I think so. I’ve noticed an unhealthy worship of Pulitzer-winning properties in Hollywood that lends itself, at times, to excessively respectful – and dull – adaptations. “The Hours” comes to mind as a particularly turgid example. I felt especially cheated having learned, from John Leonard’s review of “Empire Falls” in New York magazine, that Mr. Russo’s manuscript edged out Jonathan Franzen’s sweeping and ambitious novel of family dysfunction, “The Corrections,” for the Pulitzer in 2001. “The Corrections” would have made a far more compelling basis for an HBO miniseries.

The real problem with “Empire Falls” is that it’s too broad and sweeping to engage an audience; no one, even the well-meaning Mr. Schepisi, could have transferred this story of multiple characters and interlocking dramas into a single, coherent narrative. Maybe the meanderings of Mr. Harris’s Miles Roby – the sweet, yearning man at the center of “Empire Falls” – might have made for a tight two-hour movie, something on the scale of “Sideways.” But novels are written to be dense and complicated; that’s why, so often, filmmakers strip away the excess and concentrate on a single element or two when translating fiction to movies. Of course, at times it becomes necessary to open up multiple nights on a television network’s schedule to accommodate the grand scale of the story – but, ladies and gentlemen, this ain’t “Roots.”

The mess of Miles Roby’s life never engages the audience; there’s no real tension to it. He’s a relentlessly decent guy who tethered himself to this decaying mill town by promising the owner of the local grill (Ms. Woodward, looking incredible) to take it over whenever she dies – which would appear to be never. It’s a joy to see Ms. Woodward and her husband, Mr. Newman, on screen together; as Miles’s father, Mr. Newman inserts an electric jolt to every scene he’s in. The same, sadly, can’t be said for the normally brilliant Mr. Harris. Without the usual dark dimension that inhabits his characters, he seems lost and miserable. His issues here – confronting a lifetime of dreams deferred, many of them sexual – don’t give him anything tangible to grasp. Muddled by flashbacks and detours into the lives of his daughter, his mother, and other peripheral characters, Miles’s mysteries recede so far into the background that by the time they’re resolved, you’ve forgotten why you cared.

I suppose I should be more generous to HBO for making this movie; I’m sure others will pat the channel’s execs on the back for their noble intentions. But sometimes it’s the seeming worthiness of HBO’s projects that I find most annoying, and beside the point. One might not have thought that an adaptation of an old Robert Ludlum novel was a “worthy” Hollywood project, but “The Bourne Supremacy” turned out to be one of last year’s most intelligent movies. Maybe if HBO stopped thinking of itself as superior to all other forms of television, it might be likelier to make movies people watch to the end. I don’t care what its slogan says: HBO is TV, and sometimes not such great TV at that.

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As “American Idol” wound down to its anticlimactic close on Wednesday night, I’d already found myself feeling increasingly disenfranchised from the whole thing – and not just because the finale faced off with the last two hours of “Lost.” As Simon Cowell astutely observed in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, “Idol” has proved itself to be the ultimate red-state extravaganza. How else could you explain the departure of Constantine Maroulis of the Bronx before Bo Bice of Alabama? I’m not even sure it’s a voting bias; I still suspect that Fox rigs the results to conform to its perception of what the audience wants. (That might have made for a more explosive “Primetime Live” investigation than its lame slap at judicial improprieties.) Fox realized that a Bo-versus-Carrie face-off would please its largest constituency, the South. Think about it: all the big “Idol” stars – Kelly Clarkson, Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barino, Bo, and Carrie – come from the heart of red-state America. Once again, Mr. Cowell is to be applauded for his singular honesty and insight into the values of a nation that has so richly rewarded him for his cynicism.