Postal Inspectors To Get Boost From Movie

NEW YORK - Television reruns of bumbling fictional mailmen like Cliff Clavin of "Cheers" and Newman, Jerry Seinfeld's nemesis, get pretty tedious for real letter carriers.

Take heart, mail carriers of America. Supermailman is on his way.

The U.S. Postal Service is backing production of a made-for-TV movie about heroic postal inspectors who track down a mail bomber. "The Inspectors," starring Louis Gossett Jr. and Jonathan Silverman, is scheduled to air on the Showtime cable network Sept. 20.

The movie falls into a television nether world between commercial sponsorship of programming and infomercials, similar to magazine advertorials in the way it blurs lines dividing art and advocacy.

"I don't think it would be a good thing if it became a trend," said Dorothy Swanson, president of the nonprofit Viewers for Quality Television, Inc.

Showtime's project is the brainchild of a postal inspector who wanted to publicize his agency's little-known law enforcement arm and a former advertising executive tempted to "go postal" himself when Hollywood laughed at his requests not to bash the beleaguered public servants.

During the 1960s, television producers wanted to base a series on stories culled from the agency's files, but postal service leaders said no, said Dan Mihalko of the postal inspector's office.

Showtime financed the movie's production, while the postal service is promoting it. Television sets in post offices will show clips of the movie, life-sized cardboard cutouts of Gossett in his postal inspector uniform will be distributed and ads will be placed in magazines. Mihalko didn't know what the agency was spending for promotion.

"Although we hope to get positive PR out of it, it's not a PR piece," Mihalko said. "It's a thriller based on a mail bomb investigation by postal inspectors. The movie will stand on its own."