LEFT FOR DEAD: MIRACLE ON EVEREST. 9 p.m. May 20, National Geographic.

TIME PLUS tragedy doesn't always equal comedy.

Sometimes it leads to perspective. And sometimes it leads to overkill.

There's a bit of both at work tomorrow night in PBS' "Frontline" presentation, "Storm Over Everest," as filmmaker and climber David Breashears looks back at the storm that 12 years ago this month left eight people dead on the mountain.

Thanks in part to the presence of Jon Krakauer, a journalist on assignment for Outside magazine whose September 1996 report on the tragedy became the best-selling book, "Into Thin Air," several of those who died were fated to be remembered in a way that most of those who've been claimed by Everest are not.

Who can forget the image of expedition leader Rob Hall, high on the mountain and facing death, talking by phone with his pregnant wife back in New Zealand?

Plenty of people - even some like me, who hate heights and limit our climbing to stairs - became hooked on tales of Everest, no doubt in part because some of the very people whose presence on the mountain Krakauer appeared to be questioning were closer to mere mortals than to the godlike creatures who summited in the days before oxygen bottles and adventure tourism.

"Stories were told, forever changing the world's perception, and my own, about climbing Everest," says Breashears, who was also there, leading a film team whose footage would become part of the IMAX film "Everest."

It's the closest he comes to a mention of Krakauer - though there's a group picture of one expedition's team that includes the writer - or of others who've written about the disaster, and barely hints at the controversies those accounts ignited.

Breashears' own story, which focuses on the events that led to the deaths of five of the climbers, opens with a 2006 visit to Everest.

"Now I've come back to base camp alone, to remember and to reflect on what it was like to be here, on this mountain, 10 years ago," he says.

Fleshing out his memories are a number of survivors of the storm, among them Sandy Hill and Beck Weathers, familiar figures from "Into Thin Air," Hill (who was Sandy Pittman then) a particularly controversial one.

Not that there's any indication of that in "Storm Over Everest," which takes on a monotonous tone at times, as one interviewee after another describes his or her own particular memory.

Weathers, who lost his nose and his right hand to frostbite after being left for dead on the mountain during the storm, has told his story many times - including in his own book, "Left for Dead" - but it's still a compelling one.

Of all the survivors, he's probably the most self aware, speaking of how punishing his body by climbing had been a response to a lifelong depression (and making Hill's similar admission, in which she compares mountain-climbing to another person's retail therapy, sound shallower than she perhaps intended).

Though everyone who was there at the time and survived probably has something to say worth hearing, not everyone's equally adept at painting a picture.

It makes for a problematic presentation for those who don't already know the story well, and could be frustrating, too, for devotees of one version or another, since Breashears appears unininterested in taking sides.

Thanks to the filmmaker's wholly commendable decision to stop filming and start helping when the trouble began, "Storm" also relies on some dramatic re-creations that could undercut the you-are-there feel of this two-hour, high-definition documentary.

Ironically, in May 2006, the same month that Breashears was revisiting Everest, another dramatic story was unfolding high above base camp.

Lincoln Hall, a veteran climber from Australia who'd been stricken with altitude sickness while descending from the summit on May 25, was eventually left for dead. His family was informed, only to learn from news accounts on the Internet that Hall had had a Beck Weathers-like resurrection after spending the night alone at a level known as the "death zone."

Weathers having already used the title "Left for Dead," Hall, who'd just turned 50 when he joined an expedition up the north face of Everest, would call his own memoir "Dead Lucky."

But on the National Geographic Channel May 20, it's "Left for Dead: Miracle on Everest," and while it's every bit as cautionary a tale as "Frontline's" - you could argue that the desire to climb Everest should be considered suicidal thinking - it's undeniably the more riveting. *

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