Nat's TV reviews 2001

The new TV season is upon us, with some new shows already having debuted and further debuts barrelling down upon us. And I'm setting off on my annual quest: to watch at least one of each new prime-time network fiction show, to try to spot and champion the good stuff before it disappears, and to warn folks away from the other shining niceties that beckon.

Just so people know where I'm coming from: I'm an ardent fan of Buffy, of Malcolm (In The Middle, not And Eddie), of West Wing. Simpsons and Frasier may be passed their golden ages, but they're still better than the alternative. If I could bring two series back from the dead, they'd be Sports Night and My So-Called Life. Nikki is the pleasure I should feel guilty about but don't; Battlebots is the pleasure I should feel guilty about and do (but don't try to foist off that TNT ripoff on me, the XFL of bot-battles.) I don't watch "reality" shows, have steered away from newsmagazines ever since they proliferated to the point where there's nowhere near enough news to go around, and for ethical reasons I steer away from PAX.

There is no lack of shows on television which are basically described as an earthy man dealing with his family. Everyone Love Raymond, My Wife And Kids, According To Jim all provide repetitive half hours of uninspired and similar sitcommery (yes, I know I will hear from the Raymondites. I am not one of you.)

But THE BERNIE MAC SHOW, the last new series of the season, feels different from those other sitcoms. The difference is not that the show is a little more naughty (although it is). And it's not just that Bernie Mac (a black comedian played by black comedian Bernie Mac, a Seinfeldian move) has legitimate reason to be griping about the kids in his upscale house -- they aren't his kids, he's taking care of them for his drug-addicted imprisoned sister. As such, he's earned his griping about the kids... and while some folks will complain that he threatens the kids (both directly to them and in his frequent monologues directed at the viewer), there is no true vicious nature here. His expressions of viciousness are recognizable as merely expressions of frustrations and thwarted desires.

The feel is also different because it's a one-camera show, which not only gives it a more sophisticated feel, but also allows them to make effective use of on-screen captions that add to the humor. If you usually just listened to sitcoms, try watching this one.

But is it funny? Maybe. Fox aired two episodes tonight (the pilot being better than the second) and I was entertained, but it won't be for everyone. Some will find it crass, some will find it simply unfunny, and some will think that focusing on one character makes it of limited interest (the kids in the show are more obstacles than characters, and the beautiful wife is just there to set up the situations when she goes to work, it seems.) But while the show may not be great, it has a flavor of its own.

I'm going to look away from my network fiction to take a look at another new series, BEAT THE GEEKS. The past couple weeks some "preview" episodes have aired on Comedy Central. This trivia quiz pits three contestants against four people with expertise in pop culture: one in music, one in TV, one in movies, and a rotating fourth slot for other topics. (This week's guest-geek specialized in comics, and boasted a 9000 comic collection -- small compared to many folks I know. When he didn't even know which series Blade first appeared in, much less the issue number, he quickly lost respect in my eyes.)

The reason this game show gets my attention is that it's hosted by J. Keith Van Straaten, who has for years hosted an interesting late-night local talk show. What's so interesting about it? Well, it's not on TV. It's not on the radio. It's only in a theater. Famous and semi-famous folks allow themselves to be interviewed in front of an audience of 99. It has all the trappings of a traditional late night show -- the sidekick, the band (well, Adam & The Chesters, which was really a guy named Adam Chester with his keyboard), the running gags (most notably provided by Wil Wheaton, who would show up at the oddest and least necessary moments). J. Keith has the host gig down cold, and it's nice to see him move into the bigger-time... even if a game show does not exploit his many talents as well as the talk show did. (The talk show is officially on hiatus, with only one or two fundraising special editions over the past year. J. Keith's website, http://www.jkeith.net , claims he's planning shows now for next year.)

The game itself is a watchable but not amazing quiz game. One thing that has become apparent in just the two episodes aired to date is that there are a disproportionate number of questions regarding shows that air on Comedy Central. There is one more preview episode, airing on November 28th, and then the show starts its every-weeknight run on December 10th.

And, with the season fully launched, I guess this is the last of my review posts for a while. Most of the new shows stink, thank goodness! I've had to watch a lot of crap in this generally-lousy season. But thank goodness that it is generally lousy; if I liked everything as much as I like Scrubs, 24, and Undeclared, I wouldn't have time to do anything but watch TV!

So good night, and good watching to you!

The Tick has made an awfully long journey from being a page-filling gag strip in the back of comics store newsletter. Showing marked similarity to the Roach character from Cerebus was a deluded man as superhero. He is not deluded about being a superhero -- he is a superstrong (in a tensile sense, rather than a lifting sense) superheavyweight in a funky blue suit. He is not deluded about whether danger lurks. And yet, despite living in a world of supervillain chairs and unlikely ninjas, he still manages to picture this abstract world as odder than it is.

The new Tick TV series (the second attempt at one; the animated series of a few years back became a cult favorite) is quite true to the source comic books. This comes as little surprise, as Tick creator Ben Edlund is very much involved in the new version, writing the pilot and filling an executive producer chair to boot. And yet, the mundane scenes in the larger-than-life world of The Tick are difficult to capture in a live action show. The TV show is an earnest attempt. They've spent the money to get Patrick Warburton, one of only two actors I can think of us being suited to the title roll (the other being Bruce Campbell.) The pilot episode was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who has directed two comics-based Addams Family films and two comics-based Men In Black films.

I can't review this fairly. I liked Edlund's original comic book so much that I'm judging this off of how well it recreates that work, rather than judging it on its own merits. As a recreation, it's a good attempt,but somehow off. I think it misses the big silences that filled the air when I read the comic. It's odd how pacing can seem so real in a comic, when the passages of time are all in the mind of the reader. This had real style, a clear worldview, and lots of moments, but I still missed the timing of the comics.

But I'll still keep watching it, see if I can invest myself in this version of The Tick. There is certainly a lot to recommend this show... but the real star of it is Arthur, Tick's sidekick. An accountant who felt that he needed to let loose his inner superhero, Arthur is finding that its easy to elevate himself to the level of hero, but disappointed because he discovers that "superhero" is a lower rank of humanity than he had imagined. Good casting, funny moments as The Tick narrates his own life (not as a voiceover, he's narrating in real time), and Arthur add up to a fair amount of worthwhile material here.

Besides, Fox has scheduled this at 8:30 Thursday, filling the dead zone on NBC's Thursday schedule. It'll give me something to watch.

24 tackles something difficult -- an action-filled novel-like thriller, with action and intrigue, set in real time: 24 episodes, a 24 hour story. The performances are quite nice, particularly former teen-badguy star Keifer Sutherland as a grown-up good guy federal agent. Capable and yet weary, he's the man for the job: in this case, precenting the planned assasination of the first viable black presidential candidate.

This show combines the story depth that TV can have at its best with at least some of the visual sophistication of movies (shown most notably in the use of split-screen, used to move between storylines, to show both sides of a conversation, or sometimes just to show two shots of the same action for no visible reason beyond making a cool visual.

But...

The show is so well made that it's hard to forgive the little stupidities, like the hackable database of "Internet passwords" linked to phone numbers, or the rather extraordinary and needlessly complex measures taken by an assasin in order to commit the demonstratably-easy act of getting into the United States.

Still, the irritations are small compared to the thrills of the show. This one is definitely worth sampling, and it's best to start with the first episode, so you can invest yourself in the story. The good news is that you have at least two more chances to catch it before episode two rolls around: Fox is rerunning it on Friday, and it will run on the FX cable network on the otherwise lackluster Monday night.

This season has not set the world ablaze, to put it mildly. There is no big standout hit. The highest rated show of the new season, Inside Schwartz, is being put on hiatus during the November sweeps period, and that's bad. (It is, however, unsurprising -- as I noted in my review of that lackluster program, it is "situated in the deadly 8:30 Thursday NBC slot. When you get that slot, you know you're going to get the highest ratings of any show cancelled that year.") The second-highest rated show is The Guardian, and yet there seems to be little enthusiasm behind the viewings. Perhaps today will prove me wrong, but I doubt I'll see many trick-or-treaters today in The Guardian costumes. In terms of aroused enthusiasm, about the only show that qualifies is Smallville.

Danny is gone, Wolf Lake is on hiatus, Emeril is visiting Wolf Lake... no great losses among that bunch. The creators of The Education of Max Bickford have abandoned ship, and only time will tell if that will improve this desperately-wants-to-be-a-little-better-than-it-is show. I've taken some looks back into some of the shows I panned, and have felt no need to revise my opinions. (But damn, I wish someone would edit Citizen Baines down to just the parts with the title character, dropping out all the incompetent nincompoopery of the daughters. It would only be 10 minutes long, but it would be worth watching.) Even returning shows I like have suffered; Ed has lost its rhythm and become merely whiny, Frasier has raised its touchy-feely-to-humor ratio (although I have no complaints about having Peri Gilpin spend an entire episode in a Wonder Woman costume!), and even Buffy has lost a bit of context, sliding from being about a group that saves the world to being about a group that saves themselves (although this week's was a bit better.)

But that's not to say that there are no bright spots. Scrubs lives up to its early promise. I've come to realize that while other shows made the mistake of swiping Malcolm in the Middle's concept, Scrubs has borrowed some of its visual style, and mixed it with strong writing to bring on something good. Pasadena is still watchably trashy. The Ellen Show can still be saved. A couple tips:

1. Buffy was being rerun one episode per night on the cable network FX, and now it's upped to two episodes per night. As good as watching that series is normally, it's even better when you can glut yourself on it, totally submerging yourself into the series by watching 5 to 10 sequential hours of it per week. Yes, I'm finding some small inconsistancies I hadn't noticed before, but I'm also uncovering richness and small references that went past me. It's interesting seeing how frequently Jonathan appeared before being important, for example.
2. The most aggressively discussed show of the season, 24, is scheduled on Tuesday -- a night already overflowing with TV worth watching (Buffy, Gilmour Girls, Undecided, Frasier, Scrubs, Smallville.) However, each week's episode will be rerun on FX network the following Monday, an otherwise-dead TV night. While I'm going to watch the first episode "live" (so I can review it), I expect I'll watch the rest of them on these instant reruns.

SMALLVILLE has a tricky balance to find. It's trying to be, while not a serious drama, a serious melodrama, standing alongside the Dawson's Creeks and Pasadenas of this world. And yet, because it is about Superman in his teen years, it is filled out with superhero action (in street clothes, as young Clark Kent does not yet have his cape and skintights) and requisite supernatural menaces.

This is not a balance that is quite achieved the first time out. The superaction elements make the melodrama seem unimportant, while the melodrama makes the action seem cheesy. It's hard to care about will-she-kiss-him as a dramatic point while the electricity-weilding murderer is on the loose. Buffy The Vampire Slayer (which this replaces on the WB schedule) can balance the drama and the action by filtering both through a layer of humor, a layer which Smallville lacks, probably to its deteriment.

And yet, there are things to be said for it. The young lead looks the part, although he lacks a steely-eyed look of determination that Superman needs to be able to summon up. He does have a reasonable lost-Clark look, and wears it most of the time. The acting is all reasonable, if never quite inspiring. And the look of the piece is strong; at least for the pilot, the spend the necessary money.

This could turn out to be okay, and yet I fear it will not. There are writers who can integrate the super and the real, but they are mostly writing comics. TV writers may not know the pitfalls. There are already hints of an over-reliance on a single chunk of Kryptonite, needed to keep SuperClark from saving the day. Even in the pilot, the reasons for the K to be in various hands (and four people have had it by the end of the episode) strain credulity; imagine what difficulties they will face by episode 12.

I'll check out at least a couple more episodes; I want to see what defines Lex as a villain beyond self-destructively careless driving and penchant for wearing black. Certainly, for superhero readers it's worth taking a look at.

Dogs are not made of metal.

This may not come as a surprise to you, but it apparently is not information that was available to the makers of MEN, WOMEN, AND DOGS, one of two new sitcoms on the WB tonight. A dog being carried under a jacket sets off both a standing metal detector and a hand-held one.

And if you think they don't know much about dogs, you'd be surprised at how little they know about men and women. True, their flaws are mostly men, because the women rarely have a chance at a human reaction. The men, however, are the true dogs of the series, each with a different method of interacting with women but none treating them as human. And I'm not saying that there aren't men who don't treat women as human, and I'm not even saying that there's no room for humor from that -- but the men here are neither realistic nor humorous. The central conceit (men who hang out at a dog park mainly to meet women) is not a good basic concept, and producer/star Bill Bellamy seems to be acting in a broader show than the rest of the cast. And the obviously-dubbed laugh track seems to be watching a much funnier show.

Some folks may recall that last year's new comedy NIKKI gave me hope that The WB might finally be able to produce a good sitcom, and so I had particular wished that they would show this with OFF CENTRE, since it follows immediately after Nikki at a time when no other shows start. The show has a reasonable premise -- mild-mannered-and-involved American lives with British playboy in a swanky urban apartment. Unfortunately, the two lead actors make their roles horribly unappealing. The British lead has a grating voice and the American doesn't seem to have the camera and timing awareness to make the part work. (If you do watch the show, close your eyes while he's talking, though, and see if you don't hear the voice of St. Elsewhere's David Morse.) Some of the supporting cast and bit players acquit themselves well, and the writing approaches usable but misses -- they need to learn that they don't have to explain their jokes.

By my count, that leaves three new shows that still have not premiered... but they're the three I'm most looking forward to, so keep your eyes peeled for the reviews.

The launching of new series has trickled down. There are still a few key players waiting to launch, including such anticipation-inspiring entries as THE TICK, 24, and SMALLVILLE.

And yet, the destruction derby has already begun. If you were waiting until DANNY got better to give it a try, you're going to wait a long time. This show has been dropped from the schedule after all of 2 episodes.

There have been no new qualifying premieres since my last posting. However, I had missed the premiere of CITIZEN BAINES, but I managed to catch episode 2 this weekend. Oscar winner James Cromwell (who I still picture as Stretch Cunningham, Archie Bunker's coworker from the loading dock) stars as a Congressman who has just been voted out of office, and now has to deal with his own lack of direction and with the presence of his three grown daughters.

The daughters all have exagerated personality, making them seem more like personal obstacles than like true characters. Cromwell does an admirable job of showing that he is slowly realizes that there are new possibilities and opportunities that come along with this loss of direction and official power. The problem with this episode is that in portraying his loss of position and direction, the tale doesn't go much of anywhere, except for a nicely-done obvious symbolic moment at the end. I'll look in on this one again (hey, it's Saturday night, there's nothing else on!) and the odds seem good that it will get better or at least grow on me.

The Simpsons is an unusual animated show. The entire cast generally records the character voices together. In most cartoons, the various voice actors record their lines separately, and they're edited together later. In some cases, the actors haven't even been able to see the entire script, but only read their own lines out of context. This can create some rather stiff readings that don't integrate well with the performances of the rest of the cast.

REBA is the first sitcom that I supsect was created that way. The actors show little sign of actually responding to one another. It seems more like a first read-through than an actual performance -- particularly since the first read-through is the time when the writers hear the script and realize what portions need reworking (in this case, it seems they are instead deciding "here's where we increase the volume on the laugh track yet again" --it has a huge ratio of on-air audience reaction to actual humor content.) This is the sitcom that takes the "fun" out of "disfunctional family". Reba's husband is leaving her, her high school junior daughter is pregnant, and her younger kids, well, one of them makes wisecracks like Darlene from Roseanne, the other has a weird aura like DJ on Roseanne. But they don't live up to their archetypes.

(If there was any question whether the TV theme song was truly dead, let's note that this new sitcom starring singing sensation Reba Macintire has one of those modern 10 second musical stings at the opener. Oddly enough, Raiding Dad gets a 30 second mini-song, about as long as half hour themes get these days.)

MAYBE IT'S ME attempts to be stylish, and at least partially succeeds. A 15 year old girl deals with the thing that most 15 year old girls spend most of their days dealing with: embarassment. For the most part, it's family-derived shame, as her wacky parents, siblings (including a pair of twins -- you can't have a wasky family without young twins, in this case a pair that looks a lot like a set of young Tina Yotherses), and grandparents. There's some good cast in here, notably Fred Willard and Julia Sweeney as the parents. Designed to be part of a familyp-friendly Friday night, this will tend to be more obviously moralistic than, say, Malcolm In The Middle, but it is funny along the way. The show is narrated by its protagonist, a trick used in many lackluster sitcoms but it works well here. The storyline is accompanied by frequent little visual pop-ups, adding thought balloons or information about characters and their situations... the use of pop-ups could be a bit smoother, but it still basically works. I suspect that this family sitcom would be watchable by teenage girls and their parents; as a person who is neither, I consider it watchable, but not a must-see.

The pilot of RAISING DAD also dealt a lot with teenage female embarassment, although the protagonist is the embarasser rather than the embarassee. Bob Saget plays a recent widower who teaches in the same school that his eldest daughter attends. It was devoid of humor, and the would-be touching parts are devoid of touchingness.

Minor new season TV note: The theme songlet to the two-good-episodes-out-of-two sitcom SCRUBS has the key phrase "I'm no Superman". It airs on Tuesdays at 9:30 on NBC. I guess they're just trying to make it clear that you're not tuning into the second half of the new young-Superman show SMALLVILLE, which will be airing at the same time on the WB.

"To Boldly Go Where Several Friendly Species Have Gone Before And Can Offer Us Tips On Where To Dine."

When I switched the channel to catch tonight's premiere of ACCORDING TO JIM, the new Jim Belushi sitcom, I caught the tail end of My Wife And Kids. Damon Wayans was bribing his young daughter a dollar to not tell her mother about what he was doing.

A little less than half an hour later, we learned that Belushi's character had bribed his young daughter one dollar not to tell her mother (played by the lovely and talented Courtney Thorne Smith) about the wrong thing he had done.

This is a cliched sitcom about a cliched sitcom dad. And given its lack of actual humorous content, there is no reason to watch this.

SPECIAL UNIT 2 is not actually a new series. Apparently, this UPN show is in its second season, but its entire existence had gone undetected by me until now. The unit of the title is apparently some sort of secret Chicago police division to deal with supernatural situations (although I could not pick up if there was an actual definition of their realm of specialty), keeping the supernatural aspects of what's going on away from the eyes of the general public. It focus on one pair of cops, good-looking twentysomethings of both sexes (hey, it's UPN) and some sort of short, presumably supernatural bad boy who reluctantly assists them. If this sounds to you like a Men In Black ripoff, give yourself a cigar Of course, there's a big budget difference between a Will Smith movie and a UPN series, and there's a lack of smoothness and subtlety. I reckon this falls under the category of "stupid fun for 17 year old boys", which many nights seems to be UPN's motto.

Ever notice that some nights, TV seems to have a theme? Some uncommon little item will just happen to show up on 2 or 3 shows in a row. Well, the dollar bribery is certainly the big theme of the night, but the secondary theme was apparently Juggs Magazine, the all-American salute to mammaries which just happen to be mentioned in both of the shows I reviewed today.

BOB PATTERSON carries the signs of being created by committee, with a ton of people throwing in small ideas, set concepts, casting concepts that they thought would be great, and ended up with a big ol' mess of bits but no grace.

That isn't to say that the series has no workable central concept. Bob Patterson is a man beset by life, in contrast with his career as a motivational speaker. But he's coming back to speaking after some career stumbling, he's faced with writer's block, an ex-wife who is acting more like an ex-ex, and the pressures of various people who want a piece of him.

There are some talented folks here, and a couple of others. A little shaking out, and they might have something workable. However, apparently they already tried to fix this once. Placed up against a weakened-yet-still-watchable Frasier, I expect this doubtlessly-expensive production to have a short life.

Following the watchable Frasier is the new SCRUBS, a one-camera sitcom about a new resident. In some ways, this is the flip side of Bob Patterson; it's not the problems of a person whose life is falling apart, but those of someone who is trying to build a life that he's not prepared for. Done with a quick rhythm that fits the intensity of its setting, filled with humor that comes from exagerations of human emotions rather than ignoring them, Scrubs is off to a strong start. This show won't be for everyone; for a sitcom, it has an incredibly high "squirm" factor, so those who can't sit through ER without flinching will have some trouble here as well. But it is a strong entry, and following Frasier, I expect it to be discovered by a fair number of folks. (Although there are probably still many who will switch over to Spin City, for some reason. Not that that show was ever as good as ought have been, but with the the grating Charlie Sheen character and the inexplicable casting of Heather Locklear in a sitcom, the talented supporting cast aren't used enough to make this at all worthwhile. And what is it with this show and female characters? There are at least five female former "regulars" who have disappeared, any one of whom showed more comedic chops in a single episode than Heather will show in an entire season. Oy!)

LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT

I'd guess I'd better explain my relationship with the Law & Order shows. I am not one of those who believes that media violence leads to more real violence. However, I have real concern about the effect that media violence has on people's comfort in this world. During years when the general level of violence in America has been decreasing, polls have regularly shown that people feel the level of violence is increasing. Why? Well, I can't help but suspect that TV news is a key culprit. As the level of violence has decreased, news stories have increased. Now, when an armed robber shoots a convenience sotre clerk in Australia, we'll see the security camera footage on the loval news. Coverage of violence lacks context, leaving us feeling as if we are in a violent society, leading to a life of fear (and leading to some awful legal policy situations, as the laws address the perceived situations rather than the real one.)

Law & Order plays into this. The show has the feel of realism. It is frequently (although not always) underplayed, generally well-acted, and all in all makes its content seem quite real. And yet, they present a rather large rate of murder among the general non-drug-dealing, non-gang-member populace. And the realistic feel often covers up dubious emotional reality, or finds some unlikely scapegoat for crime (and yes, they've tarred comics that way.) The feel of the shows make them convincing, and the message they send encourages fear and scapegoating.

L&O:CI is more of the same, only moreso. It's villain-centric. The lead male cop has such a keen grasp of human nature that he seems to be ready to predict everything because his views of humankind are absolute. The first episode pushed my unhappy buttons on a couple key fronts: in one scene, the cop uses mislogic about the spread of AIDS to mislead someone, and I'm concerned he may have mislead some members of the audience, in a way that misemphasizes the effect of bisexuality. And yes, there was bisexuality among the baddies here... which I wouldn't mind so much if I could point to some positive bi depictions on series TV. Great strides have been made in depiction of homosexuality, but those whose loves are not so limited still get the short end of the stick. I've got too many friends in that category not to notice. (And before anyone tries to point to Willow on Buffy -- Willow has not failed to take sides, she has merely switched them. There was a chance last year to establish her a bi, but they went the other way.)

So I don't foresee watching this series. It joins the other L&O series on my "no thank you" list. Were it more realistic, or less realistic-seeming, then I'd be more comfortable with it. (But those of you who like L&O, do not dispair; it's available almost 24 hours a day it seems, if you have cable, and at the current rate we will see a network primetime lineup of nothing but L&O within our lifetime!)

Seeming realistic is not a problem that faces UC: UNDERCOVER (one of the many titles that has driven my wife to point out that all the good titles must have been long since taken.) The key badguys are a batch of super-bank robbers who have been hitting about a bank a week for three years. Yeah, right... the modern bank robber is the most notoriously *stupid* type of criminal. And the job of capturing these robbers have fallen to a special undercover unit of bad-asses and problem children of various sorts, who for some unknown reason have been given a large degree of autonomy. It's not quite clear why they need folks to go undercover with this group of robbers, as they clearly frequently know where these folks are and how to contact them.

So the main guy they're putting on the inside is being given the description of his cover. "Your father was a sperm donor," he is told, "and your mother gave you up for adoption." My wife and I just looked at each other. Yeah, sure, many women who go to the trouble of buying donor sperm end up giving up their kids for adoption, rrrrrriggght. (By a day later, I realized that the writers probably meant "sperm donor" sarcastically for a man who just wasn't around...but that's sure not how the line was read!)

Big guns, and Melodrama Maximized Every Single Moment! And hey, it's written by the guy who wrote Armageddon, so it must be good, right? I won't be back for more of this one.... and frankly, I doubt there'll be much more of it to come back to.

ALIAS launched in an interesting manner. The first episode was more than an hour long, and ran without commercial interruption. (It'll probably rerun on the network as an hour and a half. Don't know how they'll handle it if this series ever reaches syndication.) This show isn't realistic either; it does, however, fit into the genre of ornate covert action tales, with supersecret organizations, double agents, and supertoys. This is stylish (if not totally original in its style; there were scenes with a bottle-red-haired lead actress running to a certain musical background that evoked Run, Lola, Run rather strongly.) Smoothly done, but without the over-the-top thrills of a James Bond picture or the emotional involvement of a good spy novel. It's not a bad thing to watch, but it didn't leave me caring what happened next. I wouldn't be that suprised to see this series do well, but I don't think I'll be along or the ride.

Every couple years, I find myself with a real guilty pleasure primetime soap to watch, something all made up of artificial relationships and manipulated situations, yet with a certain bounce to its trashiness, and perhaps a willingness to explore something that is not usually explored in trashy primetime soaps. Dawson's Creek. Hyperion Bay. Yet what happens is this: six episodes of good trashiness, then a quick slide down into crappy trashiness, in which every possible combination of romantic pairings is introduced and exhausted for no good reason except that they need things they haven't done. The show was pitched with the initial six episodes plotted out, I reckon; they hadn't need to structure it beyond the six to make the sale, and there's not enough depth there to go beyond.

Friday's premiere of PASADENA, a new ABC primetime soap, gives me hope for something more. The foreshadowing narration makes it clear that the events we are seeing are leading to certain specific things a year down the road, giving me hope that they sold this with at least a rough plot for a full first season. I may get 24 episodes of enjoyable trash out of this one.

First, let me set up my relationship with this series: I lived in Pasadena for about 7 years, and still go there frequently. I know Pasadena, from the floatilla of Chinese-speaking students who attend the large Pasadena City College (alma mater to Stan Freberg and Eddie Van Halen) and hang out at the Pak-Mann Arcade, to the million dollar homes overlooking the Rose Bowl. I know it from the Spanish-speaking day laborers hanging out on the corners of Villa Street to the once-funky-artsy stores of Old Town that have been replaced with major chain outlets to take advantage of all the people who had been coming for the funky-artsy stuff. I lived directly between the path of the Rose Parade (which causes the sidewalks to be so densely populated with sleeping people the night before that it looks like the world's worst homeless problem) and the campus of CalTech (where all are nerds but some of the nerds are unspeakably beautiful.) But I sure don't know the Pasadena seen in this series (filmed in Canada except apparently for a few exteriors, notably an all-too-limited shot of the world's most beautiful city hall), the severely race-and-class-stratified country-club society, where non-white faces are somehow unseen. This may be some other place. It may (or may not) be Grosse Point. But it sure ain't Pasadena.

But if you're looking for realism, this isn't the place to look. If you're looking for the ugly inner-workings of a family of hidden, overwrought corruption viewed through the opening eyes of the family's fifteen year old daughter, then this is a series for you. Photographed better than it deserves, we're watching the bland exteriors of an L.A. newspaper magnate's clan get pulled away to reveal the various forms of darkness beneath. The process is apt to be slow, but it has the potential for fun, and despite the warning of erudite reviewers I find myself wanting to see what happens next. (Hey, how could I not want to find out what happens to a character named Nate who is just like me -- living off of large amounts of unearned wealth, brooding, going around in fast cars to buy hard drugs, it's uncanny!)

But should this series last beyond however-many-episodes-they-pitched, I'm sure my interest will quickly disappear.

DANNY was put together by the same advertiser coalition for positive programs that brought us The Gilmore Girls, and it shares some of the feel of that show (despite being half its length). It is, however, missing Gilmore Girls's central charm, the relationships between the continuing characters. The titular Danny (played by the voice that haunted The Wonder Years, Daniel Stern) is the founder/head of a boisterous community center. He is a dreamer of a man who is kept to earth and on his toes by the goings-on around him, yet never battered down. We meet his loving family, his enthused-but-not-always-responsible employees, and his gruff-but-not-bad-hearted boss -- no true nasty characters to be found in this show. But those are all just backdrop to the central character. There are some amusing moments here, but they work on the level of concept (what one does with a roomful of little girls in ballerina outfits when they don't want to learn to dance); little of the humor arises from character or dialog. So this show is polished-looking and aggressively inoffensive, but it needs to develop an actual heart or theme in order to rise out of its blandness. Don't avoid this show, but don't go to great efforts to watch it either.

THIEVES takes the basic Neil Simon formula (take two people with strong similarities, strong differences, and equal levels of passion and force them to be together) and applies it to an action series. They're both good-looking high-end thieves. He's a man of finesse and delicacy, she's a proponent of brute force and technology, and they're forced together to work for the good guys (the government). They bicker constantly, but always in ways full of both acknowledged and unacknowledged romantic tension.

The problem with the pilot lies in that "constantly" aspect. Between and amidst a-okay crime/con bits, the bickering blanketed the show. There was no room for subtlety and certainly no time for things to build. This tension should be the undercurrent of the series and it certainly should be the touchpoint of the series but it shouldn't simply *be* the series. Later episodes will show us whether every one is destined to be a repeat of the pilot, or whether they'll let the individual plots carry each with the romantic tensions simmering, perhaps eventually coming to a boil. (And before anyone raises the ever-present specter of Moonlighting: No, bringing Dave'n'Maddie finally to a boil did not kill that series. Quite the opposite, it brought us that series at its best. In the wake of that, however, the series was beset with production problems including pregnancy and injuries; throw a couple of awkward creative decisions on top of that, and that's where the lack of a clear and effective direction for the show came in. Anyone who does not believe that good stuff could have been done if it wasn't for those problems should go out and rent some of the Thin Man movies.)

Saturday saw the premiere of CITIZEN BAINE. Saturday did, but I didn't; a failure of the antenna hooked to my second VCR lead to a unviewable recording. I'll try to review episode 2 when it rolls around (although I expect to be doing a bit of traveling at that time, and my reviews may well lag by quite a bit.)

I'm not saying that I've been watching too much TV, but I just stared blankly for five minutes thinking "I know I watched two new shows last night, The Agency and... and... and..."

The "and..." was INSIDE SCHWARTZ, which is situated in the deadly 8:30 Thursday NBC slot. When you get that slot, you know you're going to get the highest ratings of any show cancelled that year. Being sandwiched between Friends and Will & Grace is such a gimmie, ratingswise, but they never quite find the show that will actually bring in viewers who weren't watching those other two shows. That timeslot is cursed. Excuse me, that timeslot is the weber show.

This new show is about a would-be sportscaster who obsesses over his old girlfriend. Now think about the way an overexcited color man talks (note to those who don't watch sports: no, I'm not talking about a colored man.) Now imagine hanging around for a half hour with someone who talks in that overstressed tone the whole time. Get to be annoying? I think so.

The gimmick of this show is that Schwartz's interior monolog is all done as sports metaphor, with famed sportscasters commenting on his life, referees and fames sportsfolk showing up to comment on what's going on. This didn't get old as quickly as I thought it would, simply because they used it a little less than I thought... but I will be shocked if this gimmick is still in the show in 13 weeks. It's an even bet whether the show itself will be around that long.

I expect this show will get a few complaints from Jewish groups. Schwartz is Jewish, but the real point of complaint would be (SPOILERS AHEAD! FEEL FREE TO SKIP IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE EPISODE AND ARE WAITING TO WATCH YOUR TAPE OF IT) the lead character's dad, who is presumably Jewish, is horribly enthusiastic about ham (a no-no in traditional Judaism) and who hires a prostitute for his son. I wasn't offended, but the awkwardness of the ham part really got to me. The prostitution part reminds me how my maternal grandfather responded to my mother's announcement that she was marrying a Jewish boy by saying "you know it's the Jews who keep the hookers in business, right?"

I'm not a sports fan, by and large. In the typical year, I watch one televised football game and maybe 4 stock car races, and go to one live sporting event. But I'm not inherently against sports-related fiction -- certainly, the average baseball movie is better than the average baseball game, and I was a big fan of Sports Night. I was rarely lost by the sports references (there's one baseball player who I was unfamiliar with), but I wasn't amused by them either. There is some talent among the cast members, but I'll be glad when The Tick starts up and gives me something to watch at 8:30 on Thursdays.

THE AGENCY is about the CIA. Automatically, that sounds problematic, since you can't really do a CIA show without taking some sort of stand on their morality. The stance here seems to be "old CIA bad, current CIA good", although in this episode it's really just doing whatever they are told by those higher up. Despite a good cast (this is a good year for people I like getting work -- this cast include Rocky Carroll and David Clennon) this was not a show I was looking forward to, nor did it win me over. The central flaw is that it was about the agency, rather than the people who work there. While there were attempts made to build human interest around the people, it still felt more like a tale of a bureaucracy. Not a thrill. And the convolutions of espionage and international relations make it hard to root for anything in the show.

My wife has a thing for Scott Bakula. That's not vital to the review, but I just thought I'd mention it.

I no longer feel the urge for more Star Trek. When there were just three seasons of oft-rerun Trek, the thought of more Trek sounded good. Now there are dozens of seasons and a pile of feature films, and I cannot say the world is hurting for lack of Trek. Still, the thought of seeing the early days, when mankind was first encountering aliens, unsure how to react in the face of such strong unknowns...

But as it turns out, that is not this story. Humans have known the Vulcans for a long time, and the Vulcans have a lot of knowledge about what's out there. So the sheer adventure, the sheer mystery, is gone.

The series doesn't fit into the feel of Trek history as I see it. Rather than being a bold race who reached out from their planet, the humans are a race whose reach for the stars is enabled and controlled by Vulcans.

Bakula is a captain in Kirk mode -- he's not there to oversee the ship, the ship is there to provide support for his own direct involvement. He seems more like a good lone wolf inappropriately given a captain's rank. The vulcan science officer and the supporting humans didn't really grab me; the only character I found myself perking up for was the ship's overenthusiastic alien doctor.

They've already set up a big villain for the series, and seemingly in an attempt to bring us a different big villain, they have made it a time-control villain. In less than precise hands, time control lends itself to very poor stories, and trying to dictate the ongoing villain before the series has had time to find itself seems less than wise.

I don't anticipate needing to watch this... but my wife may feel the need to get a Bakula fix, so I may well end up seeing it anyway.

Tuesday night was a two-VCR night... and even so, The Lovely Lara seemed a bit disappointed that I hadn't taped the Michael J. Fox guest appearance on Spin City as well (even though we weren't watching the series at the end when he was on it, due in large part to the presence of comedic void Heather Locklear.)

Sitcoms seem to break down into two camps: those that come from the humor of a character's ridiculousness seeming real (say, All In The Family or Frasier) and those that come from the character's reality seeming ridiculous (Get Smart.) The new show Emeril has no real characters to be interested in, so it would have to tend toward the later camp, but the ridiculous stuff isn't funny enough to qualify. Note to TV followers: Robert Urich is in this series, in a supporting role. He's had new series in '98, '96, '93, '92, '90... and then you get back to the point when he was in successful series -- one that ran '85-'88, oh okay his '82 series was a flop, but then we have one that ran '78-'81, one that ran '77-'81 that he left at the end of the first season, a '77 flop, a well-remembered '75-'76 series, and a '73 flop. If you can name them all, I pity you. But you gotta respect the man's ability to get work.

SPOILERS FOLLOW: UNDECLARED The sitcom Undeclared is firmly in the real-seeming camp. This one comes from Judd Apatow of Freaks & Geeks fame, so I was predisposed to like it. It's about the kids on one floor of a freshman college dorm. Some kids are freaking out about it, some are vibing on the groove, and our central character is dealing with his own illusions that he is suddenly no longer a geek -- as well as dealing with his mother's sudden plans for divorce and his father's embarrassing ongoing presence on campus. The cast on this one has a couple interesting folks: Seth Rogen, who was great as the odd-voiced freak on Freaks&Geeks, is here, and the father is played by musician Loudon Wainwright III. This is the best show I've seen in the new season, by a long shot. The embarrassment, the excitement, the awkwardness, I remember it all, and it was all like this.

(For those of you who watched it, I'm registering a prediction now: Lloyd, the student with the girl-winning British accent, who was wearing the British flag shirt? My money says that within the first six episodes, it will be revealed that he's American. Why do I think that? Because the accent gets the girls, because wearing the flag shirt was showy, because he's a theater major... and because I pulled something very similar one year at school, when I was there among a floatilla of new freshwomen.)

PHILLY is set mostly in Philadelphia's city hall, where I've been quite a few times (mostly in the courtyard and pedestrian walkways that pass through the building, but a couple of times on the inside.) So I want to like it. And I do like the casting -- anyone who casts Tom Everett Scott, the eerily Tom Hanks-like lead from That Thing You Do, gets my support. But this lawyer show is supposed to be a serious drama, and yet the court room scenes are at best as real as those on Ally McBeal. The lawyers and the judges are all acting in ways that seem ridiculous even to that lay eye (and from what I hear, the legal eye echoes that even more strongly.) I would not be watching another episode of this... if it wasn't for the fact that the L.A. Times review says that episode 2 is far far better.

I really wanted to like THE GUARDIAN. A couple months back, I was having drinks with a couple of the series stars and the director (who also showed up in one scene), and they seemed such nice folks, and I know that they're talented. And the concept is okay. But when people first appear here, they don't tell you their name, they tell you their agenda. And they are all harsh and unreasonable and frequently unethical in their pursuit of causes good and evil. This is a series about a high-priced corporate lawyer who is tried on a drug charge and is sentenced to probation and 1500 hours of community service working for a group of child advocacy lawyers. The sentencing judge actually tells him that he'll be taking his experience from corporate law and using it to help these kids. Excuse me?!? You don't have to be a legal expert (which we will politely assume the judge to be) to realize that corporate law and family law are about as far apart on the law map as two categories can get. Sure, if the kids need to set up an accelerated depriciation of their assets or set up proper bond authorization, this lawyer might be useful, but beyond that?

I'll probably look in on this one a few episodes down the road, see if they've gotten the bumps out of the concept (and if the supposedly Pittsburg-born lead can keep from letting his Australian accent leak out.) But I cannot recommend it.

I actually missed the pilot of DEAD LAST at some point (which is not the biggest surprise I'm facing -- tonight I discovered the existence of a returning series that I had never heard of before, UPN's Special Unit 2.) They did give enough expository, however: the three members of a small-time traveling rock band gain the ability to interact with ghosts. Most folks who gain this ability want to help the ghosts settle their problems, so that they can move on to the heaven or whatever. This series from Steve Pink, D.V. DeVincentis and our own Patrick O'Neill (okay, probably a different one) reminds me of some self-published black and white comics: amateurish and awkward and yet with an enthusiastic energy, not firing on all cylinders but getting some interesting sparks from time to time. It could be a lot tighter, and probably would be more effective in a half hour. Not something I can actually endorse, but something that I would look in on from time to time, if I thought it had any life in it. However, it's airing in the timeslot that Smallville takes over shortly, which ain't a good sign. Worse yet, the WB's website listing for the show, in the area where it lists what show is coming next, says "The next episode of Dead Last has yet to be determined." That can't be good.

A homosexual leaves the big city to rejoin disfunctional family in small town America. Do this with ugly overtones, and you get John Goodman's entry in last year's Disappointing Sitcoms With Talented Stars derby. Do this with an upbeat bounce, and you get CBS's watchable-though-not-amazing The Ellen Show.

The promotional material for this show suggested that they would be downplaying the gay theme, which worried me. After all, Ellen Degeneres's previous show These Friends Of Mine (later renamed Ellen) was a horrible example of a pointless sitcom *until* they introduced the gay theme, at which point it became actually *about* something, giving it a wellspring of humor. However, the homosexuality is not ignored. SPOILER WARNING FOR THOSE WAITING TO WATCH IT FROM TAPE. Some fun is had with Ellen's old room having been decked out in protolesbian chic (Wonder Woman and Billie Jean King posters), and a running gag through the episode is about the butch gym teacher at the local school who is instantly smitten with Ellen, presumably because she's the only other lesbian in town now. (There's a fine comedy song with this lonely theme, "The Only Gay Eskimo".)

There were a few laugh-out-loud moments in this show (including one rather obvious joke that I fell for), but the emotional context really wasn't involving. Ellen's decision to stay back home didn't come from any vast emotional truth, but was mere sitcom set-up. Okay, they've got it set up, now let's see what they do with it. This show isn't on my definite long-term watch list, but it'll get at least another couple episodes to make its case.

Sitcom fans should note that the series regular include Cloris Leachman, Martin Mull, and Jim Gaffigan (the relatively unknown centerpiece of last year's Welcome To New York, which managed to waste the talents of Christine Baranski, Rocky Carroll, and Sarah Gilbert.)

Also debuting on Monday was Crossing Jordan, about an overenthusiastic medical examiner who can't keep a job because she keeps expanding her examination beyond its proper limits, trying to solve murders herself. The characters are good; comics writer Miguel Ferrer, as her boss, is fun to watch (as always), and it's nice to see Ken "The White Shadow" Howard again, playing her ex-cop dad. The actual plot for this one was rather clumsily done (which was what drove me away from CSI after one episode -- CSI's success being the obvious reason for this show's existence), and the casting of Kyle Secor in a guest role actually telegraphed part of the plot. However the character stuff was nice enough that I will be revisiting it. Perhaps the plots will be better now that they have the set-up out of the way.

Due to a phone call, my wife missed a fair portion of last night's premier of THE EDUCATION OF MAX BICKFORD. A minute after she rejoined the show, she asked "is this as overwrought as it seems?" "Well, it's certainly got a lot of wrought..." I replied.

I guess I'd better put up a SPOILER WARNING for those who taped the episode but have not watched it yet. During this episode, we learn that Professor Max Bickford (played by the ever-convincing Richard Dreyfus) is a recovering alcoholic widower who is passed over for promotion for a student he had carnal knowledge of 15 years before, who is being forced into a department management position that he doesn't want, whose daughter announces a missed period, whose best friend took a sabbatical and has just come back with a new gender, whose students are uncaring, inattentive, and demand unearned grades, and whose son doesn't make the basketball team. And oh yes, Max is writing a novel, a thinly veiled version of his life, only he is named "Skylar" in the book. And the novel is bad. Not a lot of subtlety in bringing him to a low point that he has to rebuild himself from.

To be fair, I'm not sure that the novel is *supposed* to be bad, so maybe that isn't supposed to be part of his miserable life. My wife was quite annoyed with the on-going narrative of events that comes from Max composing the novel. I liked it though, because I thought it perfectly captured the sort of lousy novel I would expect from a burned-out professor who was seeking to redeem himself by reprocessing his life at fiction at age 50-something.

So it's overwrought... but it is well made. The cast is strong, the dialog is generally good. The real question is: now that they've got the lead character striving upward, will their be good plots along that path? I'll give this series at least a few more episodes to find out. I like Dreyfus, and this is a project with the aroma of quality (if accompanied by the stench of trying a bit too hard to be Greatly Respectable Material. Dreyfus said that he considered going into TV at this time because of the example that The West Wing has set, but that show launched with a lot of fun built in, and fun is something missing from this new show.)

Give it a try. Things to watch for in the pilot: Ron Glass from Barney Miller plays another professor, although apparently his is not a regular character on the series. And Max's 12-step sponsor runs a classic auto restoration shop, so there's a scene with some nice cars to ogle.

While the real start of the new TV season has been delayed until next week, a new show did premiere on Wednesday.

WOLF LAKE features Lou Diamond Phillips as a cop whose fiancee disappears after a violent incident, and the trail leads him to a small town where Things Are Not What They Seem (Except To The Audience, For Whom Its Not Very Subtle.)

There was something about this that didn't feel quite like a TV show, nor quite like a movie. Then it hit me: it felt like a computer adventure game, from the early days of graphic adventures. Constant mood music plays. "You enter the restaurant. You cannot find a waitress. The place is deserted except for a single customer, a friendly gent, seemingly an American Indian. 'Is that a .39 or a 9 milimeter you have?' he asks. How do you respond?"

SAY WHAT?

"'Strapped to your ankle,' says the grinning man, letting you know that he has picked up on you and recognized you as a cop."

ITS A 38

I do not understand the command ITS

SAY ITS A 38

"'Oh, an old-fashioned type of guy!'"

ASK FOR WAITRESS

"The grinning man plays with what appears to be a hard-boiled egg. 'This late, the place is on the honor system. Go to the refrigerator and take what you want.'"

HEAD TO KITCHEN

"As you head to the kitchen door, the grinning man says 'Be careful of Rusty!'"

OPEN DOOR

"The door bonks against the head of a man asleep on the floor. This must be Rusty."

TURN BACK

"The grinning man has mysteriously disappeared, but the egg is still on the table, spinning on end."

Filled with mysteriousness but lacking mystery, echoing touches of Twin Peaks without catching the bizarrity of it, unable to evoke a convincing small town, Wolf Lake is on worth skipping... particularly since it seems unlikely to last long enough to reach whatever mysterious core they're aiming to explore.

The characters don't take time to be characters, they spend their lives being non-stop insult machines, and not particularly amusing ones at that. They're not intriguing, they're not involving, and they're not amusing. Skip this one.