on the edge; Joan Juliet Buck looks at Annie Oakley's Wild West, Stephen King, and the horrors of Iraq in a variety of contrasting shows.(American Experience)(Television program review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

One of the more lighthearted specials this month is the American Experience documentary on PBS about the tiny Quaker prodigy Phoebe Ann Moses. Sent to the poor farm when her father died, she taught herself to shoot at 15, changed her name to Annie Oakley to go onstage, and became known as one of the greatest sharpshooters of all time. Her fame grew in the Wild West shows in the 1880s. She would shoot the ace of hearts out of a card at 30 paces while her husband, Frank Butler, acted as her assistant. She was small, thin, adorable, ladylike, and prim; Chief Sitting Bull tried to adopt her. On August 11, 1903, newspapers reported annie oakley steals a negro's trousers to pay for cocaine. The woman was, of course, an impostor, but libel sticks, and Annie Oakley spent the next six years suing 55 newspapers, all but one successfully. The narration tells us that by 1910 she had become an artifact of the past, "her fame founded on a skill necessary in the winning of the West." She died, at 66, in 1926.

A very different West is the setting for Stephen King's Desperation, which airs on ABC on May 18. The combination of the name Stephen King and the sight of a dead kitty tied to a road sign in the first minute tells you what's coming. A cop who looks like Bigfoot stops a young couple in a car on a deserted Nevada highway, and, with the man's driving license in hand, says, "I see you're an organ donor-think that's wise?" The cop hauls Peter and Mary past gantlets of computer-enhanced dogs and off to a town where the only people appear to be corpses. He kills Peter, puts Mary behind bars in a jail where he's already collected another couple, their wise-

beyond-his-years son, and an old man. Then he goes back out and catches an aging he-man novelist on a motorcycle.

The result is two intense hours of dread and one hour of back story about the big old mine just outside of town and its earth spirits. Directed by Mick Garris, the film is brought right up to date by the son's fervent belief in God, which is the occasion for heated theological debate between the child and the novelist. You suspect this may be Stephen King's Dostoevsky moment or maybe his born-again moment.

The film is remarkable for the actors: Ron Perlman, who has made a career of gentle giants, lets his devils out as the cop whose good-guy pose erupts into comic rants-"You smart-aleck blue-state swingles!"-which then morph into the skin-splitting rages that are here a sure sign of possession.

The blood and brimstone of the Far West are thin and silly next to the true gore of Iraq. For the excellent HBO documentary ...