October 2000 Archives

I had such high hopes for Level Nine. Any show about super dooper hacker spooks that starts off with somebody whistling "Bicycle Built for Two" would, on first impression, appear to have both the perspective and sense of humor to spin entertaining stories about crusading geeks.

Unfortunately, Level Nine fails to live up to its first impression. In fact, it fails to live up to any impression at all. An hour after watching the show, I couldn't recall a single character's name, nor ninety percent of the expository dialogue that made up most of the show. And I took notes.

Fortunately, those notes may refresh my memory: Level Nine follows the assorted adventures of a group of youthful hipster hackers as they stop crime for the Federal Government. There are too many of them to tell apart.

The premiere episode, like many clumsily executed premiere episodes before it, spends a lot of time on expository nonsense. We're supposed to find out that one of the hacker corps -- I'd say the one with the tattoos and the earrings and Dystopic Chic ensemble, but that doesn't exactly narrow it down among the ninety or so lead Level Niners running around on screen -- has a tattoo that indicates he used to run with the Level Nine hacker nemesis, Crazy Horse. Is he playing for Uncle Sam now, or acting as a human trojan horse? Who knows? Who cares?

The real mystery is not whether or not this brooding cipher is playing for the good guys, but rather why any of them are working for the government at all. The head suit carries on about Level Nine being comprised of the best government hackers, but given that the government a) pays peanuts and b) does not offer a boatload of options to its programmers as compensation for its lowly wages, why would any prodigiously talented programmer be working for the Feds when they could pull a Fanning and invent a networking technology that panics an entire industry?

Perhaps, I thought, these code jockeys were motivated by the kind of ideological zeal that drives the folks on The West Wing, but there wasn't a single thing in the show to back that up. Not one of the people in Level Nine professed any ideological underpinnings to their actions other than propelling the leaden script toward the next commercial break. If we had one sign -- any sign -- that the folks knew they were sitting out the dotcom craze to serve a sense of civic duty, then the show would be a little more plausible. But we don't. In addition to not knowing who the hell these people are, we have no idea why they're here.

We also have no evidence that they know what they're doing. Sure, they have a lot of useful skills when it comes to technology -- but the characters have shockingly little perspective on how that technology affects their lives. While I was watching them blithely eavesdrop, film and bug anyone they pleased, I was reminded of seminal geek movies Real Genius and Sneakers. In both cases, you had very bright people using technology to ensnare the bad guys, much like the people in Level Nine. But the characters in those movies communicated a sense of awareness regarding their actions. They could place what they did in the bigger picture. And they were funny.

The lack of humor is what makes Level Nine so dulling. Geeks have a sense of humor; the tradition of pranks at MIT and CalTech bears this out, as does the presence of 256 different brands of Star Trek humor floating about the Internet. You don't get humor without perspective.

And ultimately, that's what all the complaints about Level Nine circle back to: its lack of perspective. The people who put it together don't seem to have a bead on what life in front of a monitor is like, and they've passed their flat and blurry vision on to the rest of us.

Cursed isn't just a bad show. It's an actively unpleasant experience, something like taking the most annoying guy on an average city bus, and living inside his life for a half hour.

Steven Weber stars as Jack, the guy who gets -- that's right! -- cursed. It turns out that being cursed means that lots of horrible things happen to Jack, like getting demoted, and losing his car keys.

I didn't understand, when I first heard the show's premise, just how poorly this would play out on the screen. For every bad thing that happens to him, Jack has to tell each of the other people on the show how horrible his life is. This might be funny if the things that happened to him were funny to hear about, but it's not inherently funny to watch Steven Weber talking about how he almost got fired until he started crying and managed to just get a humiliating demotion.

To be fair, he does get beat up by a clown at one point, but it's not played in a funny way. I realize that doesn't sound possible, but I'm pretty sure you could put the Marx Brothers, the Keystone Kops, Jim Carrey, and W.C. Fields in this show and they'd be less funny than the 1998 Congressional Record as read by, um, I don't know. Someone who's not very funny, I guess. Sorry, I'm not up for coming up with clever metaphors after spending a half our with my mouth gaping open while I stared at the pointlessness that NBC has seen fit to label as a "comedy." Perhaps I can soothe my troubled mind by finding refuge in a plot synopsis.

It seems that Jack, after breaking up with his girlfriend for the fifth time, is going out on a blind date with a woman of Greek ancestry. This woman talks nonstop through their date, which would have had the phrase "from hell" attached to it a few years ago. At the end of the blind date, Jack tells her he doesn't want a second date, and she curses him. This comes out of the blue, as Jack is being quite reasonable, and she didn't seem particularly magical up until that point. But it turns out she had a Gypsy grandmother and got taught the mystical arts of providing thin premises for short-lived sitcoms.

Aside from deeply plumbing Jack's miserable and distinctly unamusing life, Cursed follows Jack's attempts to woo back his shrill harridan of an ex-girlfriend. Melissa, played by Amy Pietz, is a mean, uninteresting jerk. There is not a single moment when she seems remotely like someone I would want to date, or even allow in my house. This is probably because her job on the show is to listen to Jack complain, tell him she doesn't care, and then refuse to go out with him.

It's amazing how unpleasant the people in Cursed are. By ten minutes in, I was screaming at my television for the bad people to shut up and go away. For a show to have a Moonlighting or early-Cheers vibe of "will-they-or-won't-they", it's important that the audience want the two romantic leads to be together. In this case, I didn't have any great objection to their getting together, as long as they did it somewhere where it didn't have any chance of getting on my television by accident.

Perhaps you're wondering if there's anyone else on the show. I'd hoped to spare you the terrible knowledge, dear reader, until you were a little older: Chris Elliott is back on television. And while it makes sense that Chris Elliott would be a zany sidekick, I don't understand how a loving God could allow him to be nude on national television. Oh, and there's some guy at Jack's work, but he barely has a running gag to his name. A name which, naturally, I forget. If only I could scrub my memory clean of the sight of Chris Elliott swanning about nekkid.

Oh well, nothing equals comedy like a depressed guy complaining about having been fired, right?

Now that I've made my opinion clear on the show, let's turn to NBCi's "Cursed Club." Someone at NBC has heard their nutty teenage kids talking about this "Internet" thing, and now nothing will do but the network must have a ready-made "online community." There's not much yet, since the show has barely started, but it's already got a horrifying cross-section of Chris Elliott fans lamenting the loss of Get a Life, Steven Weber fans lamenting the loss of Wings, and Amy Pietz fans lamenting the loss of Caroline in the City. And naturally, all this lamenting makes for one exciting "community." Finally, the opposing camps of Get a Life fans and Wings fans have come together to find common ground.

Somehow, I suspect that when Cursed dies its deservingly painful death, there won't be people lamenting it in the years to come.

It has been noted that there's a fine line between clever and stupid, and nowhere is that line finer than in science fiction. The same material used by a visionary to produce something as wonderful as "Star Wars" can be used by a third-rate hack to create "The Phantom Menace." And though Dark Angel, the latest in post-apocalyptic SF, treads awfully close to the line sometimes, at least it comes at it from the clever side.

But down to business: Max (Jessica Alba) is the omni-ethnic, post-moral, bio-engineered woman of the future. Spawned in a secret government lab, she and a dozen of her tube-born brethren escape to freedom in 2009 and spend the next decade blending into a society thrown into chaos by a terrorist nuclear bomb. Accidentally teamed up with do-gooding journalist Logan (Michael Weatherly), she has all sorts of adventures -- a significant number of which involve getting wet -- while searching for her siblings and being pursued by the evil Lydecker (John Savage), head of the project that developed her.

Dark Angel's creator, James Cameron, is well known as the worst husband of the century and the demon auteur behind such geek classics at "The Terminator," "Aliens," and "Piranha II: The Spawning." As the first project following the weepy, money-manufacturing "Titanic," Dark Angel returns him to his roots, taking nearly every SF cliché in the book -- a future police-state, genetic engineering, ruthless government agents, underground rebels -- and managing to assemble them in a way that turns out to be a surprising amount of fun. For a series so riddled with Science Fiction 101 formula rejects, Dark Angel does its job remarkably well.

A good part of Cameron's success in the past has come from the worlds he builds. His best movies are heavy with unmentioned history and culture, common threads binding the characters and events together. Dark Angel is built on one of these worlds, and the larger canvas of television is either going to allow it to grow, or show it for the tissue-thin invention most science fiction tries to get away with. For all of Dark Angel's potential, the series' fate rests heavily on its universe and how much time viewers are willing to spend in it.

Equally important is Alba, who I would like to have sex with. Ah. Um. I mean, who is the human center around whom that universe turns. Telegenic and self-assured, she's a find. Though underserved by scripts that leave her either hard-core cynical or belly-soft sentimental -- occasionally in the same scene -- Alba manages to go a good way toward excusing a lot of what creaks and sways around her. For instance, it's frustrating that she has the ability to sell Max as a morally disinterested killer, even though Cameron only lets her create situations where the bad guys off each other.

The dialog and the details of the show share some of the same half-there, half-not problems. For a post-apocalyptic world two decades in the future, a lot of the fashion, slang and technology appear to be straight out of the pedestrian, every-day present. If the world "dealio" is still around in twenty years -- much less pay phones, Apple Cinema Displays and the same cell phone I use now -- I swear I will kill myself. Yes, some of these concessions have to do with the budgetary limitations of television, where a burning car on the side of the road is universal short-hand for "post-apocalyptic," but too often the failures seem more of imagination than money. Max works with varied and wacky folk, relaxes at a bar, has unfortunate relationships -- put her in a skirt and you could re-use cast-off Ally McBeal scripts for the parts of the show where she's not kicking people in the head.

But all this is quibbling, really, because Dark Angel does work. The action is fast and varied, the look is almost always interesting, and the handful of supporting players are fun, in varying degrees. (The name "Original Cindy" earns bonus points.) There are enough tidbits scattered about -- the government agents pursuing Max, her siblings, the seizures she suffers, everyday life in the burned out shell of the Pacific Northwest -- to build an X-Files (or, better, Futurama)-scale mythos, something to reward those paying attention.

And there's Alba. She's proven she can play a better character than the one handed to her by the writers. If they ever catch up, Dark Angel could be something much more than the moderately interesting exercise in cliché-reproduction that its first few episodes have taken pains to establish it as. It could be something clever.

Ambrose Bierce was once asked for advice on child-rearing. His reply: "Study Herod, madam. Study Herod."

I watched Boston Public and was reminded of Mr. Bierce's advice by 8:04 p.m. By 8:05 p.m., I was ready to embrace a Biblical regime, if it would only guarantee that each of the loathsome little primates that populate Winslow High would meet their deservedly gruesome ends.

Boston Public provides exhibits A through Z on why we should be practicing any of the following:

1. Mandatory military schooling for anyone over the age of ten.
2. Corporal punishment for misbehaving students, up to and including horsewhipping.
3. Installation of radio collars designed to control the unruly. One hostile or disrespectful act, and the teacher could respond by zapping the student with enough voltage to power Buffalo in January.

Want a core sample of the students who make Boston Public such a wretched place to be? Try this: one little tramp who's intent on sexually humiliating the staff, a distaff Matt Drudge who's getting her ya-yas from slandering the teachers on her gossipy Website, and a host of slack-jawed bullies. What makes each of these children galling is their smug, self-centered assurance.

Yes -- these snotlings are the spawn of yuppies, and they're fluent in legal sass, victim rhetoric and a dozen other specious behaviors that would have earned me or any of my peers a world of parental hurt. If there's a message in David E. Kelley's latest show, it's that the generation who spent the Eighties whelping the world's Ashleys, Tylers and Taylors has a lot to answer for, in this life and the hereafter.

The beleaguered teachers of Winslow High -- helmed by the riveting Loretta Devine as a suicidal special-ed teacher; Joey Slotnick as an endearing noodge and English teacher; Anthony Heald as the dignified, slightly ossified vice principal; and Chi McBride as hella principal Steven Harper -- rival Job in terms of the trials they must endure on a daily basis. Although the titular focus of the show is youthful social studies teacher Lauren Davis (played by Jessalyn Gilsig, an actress who looks and sounds as though David E. Kelley plopped Calista Flockhart on a photocopier and punched "150%"), she's eclipsed early on by Devine, Slotnick, et. al. This isn't a bad thing.

And, for a Kelley show, this is amazingly believable. My best friend used to be a seventh-grade gym teacher. That's used to be, and she credits the parents who used to call her, screaming over their child's C and refusing to hold their children accountable for their actions, with helping her make the decision to leave. The parents on Boston Public are surprisingly true-to-life, showing up only to complain about the way their brats are treated without questioning what might have pushed the teacher over the edge.

Like all Kelley shows, Boston Public has its flaws -- a declamatory monologue every five minutes, plenty of idealists who manage to ignore abundant evidence pointing to the futility of their quest, and Fyvush Finkel. But for those of you who manage to make it through The Practice or Ally McBeal on a regular basis, those are minor quibbles. The rest of us -- including people like me who normally use the words "David E. Kelley" as an epithet -- might even be willing to overlook these and other Kelleyisms, provided the show continues to grapple with the tough questions that the first episode raises.

And even if the show slips into the usual Kelley pattern -- a strong first season, with subsequent seasons slipping into self-parody -- it still has something for everyone. Fox has a new drama to bulk its thinning ranks. McBride has something on his resume to obliterate Desmond Pfieffer. Proponents of school vouchers have a series of sixty-minute commercials promoting their cause. And the rest of us have the viewing pleasure accompanying the knowledge that now, as in the time of Herod, the parents of those malevolent minors will eventually reap what they sow. I just hope they reap during sweeps.

Ms. Davis' previous job -- and, we're guessing, her next job -- as the mother of a computer-animated mouse in "Stuart Little," was no tour de force, but it's clear that in between that and this, her eponymous TV series, she attended the famous Brooke Shields School of Thespianity. You know, the one with classes like "Advanced Being A Tall Actress Next to a Short Leading Man" and "Mastering That Deer-Across-the-Headlights Look."

Here Geena stars -- much the way a black hole is a star -- as Teddie Cochran, goofy and, yes, it must be said, tall single woman living in New York. What she does for a living is hard to explain, really -- she's the head of a non-profit company of some kind which manages to afford her a lavish lifestyle replete with expensive suits and an enormous Manhattan apartment. And two deeply annoying clichés for high-maintenance friends, played by Mimi Rogers and Kim Coles as, respectively, the man-hating bitch and the soul sistah.

In a stirring montage reminiscent of Scorsese, of Bergman, of -- dare I say it -- the opening credit sequence of Three's Company, Teddie meets and falls in love with Peter Horton from thirtysomething, here called Max Ryan. Peter has the benefit of being tall, so at least he can be included in shots with Geena, which might be easier for the cinematographer but is probably very bad for Peter's clip reel. Not that he does anything here you haven't seen before, right down to his everpresent Miami DeVice stubble.

Teddie and Max fall in love, yes, and Max proposes, and the two fiancees move in together, Teddie joining Max in his positively palatial mansion in the suburbs of New York. There she finds -- gasp and swoon! -- Max has two adorable moppets she must stepmother. More surprisingly, Max has what is credited as a "caregiver," Gladys, who, in the manner of all middle-aged black women, is wise and taciturn, and also cynical about the competence of this newcomer to the family.

Consider this the sequel to the squattingly wretched Chris Columbus film "Stepmom," only without the uplifting benefit of watching Susan Sarandon die a slow, painful death.

The moppets are bad. They are given dialogue, like all adorable moppets, which could only be churned out by overpaid Hollywood joke-slingers. And whatever they say or do which isn't overinflated is in shatteringly poor taste; as when the 13-year-old boy, Carter, sees that Teddie has joined her first family breakfast wearing only a t-shirt, and he performs a pop-eyed doubletake that would have shamed Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas. He gets to do this not once, not twice, but three times in the pilot episode. Carter is going to grow up to have issues. To say nothing of the unfortunate child actor, John Francis Daley, trapped in the role. Just a few years ago, John Paul Steuer was removed from Grace Under Fire when Brett Butler waved her new boobs at him; now it's a gag when a 13-year-old is looking at Geena Davis' middle-aged buttcrack.

Peter Horton is also bad. He does what he can, true, but that's not much beyond standing around like a board off of which the jokes are supposed to bounce. He projects an upper-middle-class stability directly at odds with his choice of this ridiculous woman for his wife, but hey, who wouldn't fall for those mile-long legs or those mile-deep dimples?

The rest of the supporting cast is also also bad. They're filler, sawdust in the already cheap and fatty chopped meat of this show. They're lucky, each of them, if they can nail the cardboard silhouettes of their caricatures to the backdrop. Particularly noteworthy is bon vivant Harland Williams' pathetic imitation of a human somewhere in the middle of the show. You might remember him as the irritant around which the oyster Disney secreted the brilliant pearl known as "Rocket Man." Why this hasn't resulted in the nuclear annihilation of both Los Angeles and Orlando we cannot imagine.

Into this morass enters Geena Davis. Her time at the Brooke Shields University, Actressing Campus was not wasted. She is every bit as incapable as she is irking. Her every facial expression a rictus, her every line falling to the soundstage floor with a resounding clang, she storks her way through this insipidation with lurching incompetence. She is a frizzed, spackled, sequacious nightmare, dizzyingly stupid, numbingly godawful, a rapidly sinking corvette becalmed in a sea of ineptitude. Not only doesn't Geena Davis belong on TV -- she doesn't belong anywhere. Napoleon would have kicked her off of Elba, Charlie Manson would chase her out of his cell. After The Geena Davis Show is deservedly cancelled, she should be dropped into the deepest part of the Marianas Trench where her bones can dissolve in the calcium-poor waters after her flesh has fed the bioluminescent fish.

This will not come to pass, this reviewer can tell you that. What will instead happen is this show will tootle along, poofing out little banal farts of video footage, while ABC figures out what worthless huddled mass of humanity should next benefit from a sitcom budget and enough craft services to feed every child hunkering down to three grains of rice behind Sally Struthers and her film crew. While each episode of The Geena Davis Show airs, just over 250 people across the world will have died of diarrhea for want of about seven cents a day's worth of simple salts and sugars.

And Geena Davis, and Peter Horton, and David Flebotte and Terri Minsky and Gene Stein and Nina Wass, will retire to their comfortable beds, unaware of the great injustice they have visited upon the world.

What I had forgotten was that I rather liked the first episode of Providence -- even if other Vidiots have chosen it as their whipping girl [kicks Schmeiser under the table]. For what it is, Providence is okay. But then, I also used to watch Sisters.

I cannot say that I enjoyed That's Life the way I enjoyed the gyrations of Sela Ward in that prime-time soaper. I didn't even enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the triumphant return of B.J. Hunnicut to network TV. In fact, I didn't enjoy That's Life at all, because it is a bad, bad show.

The trouble is it's not egregiously bad. It's not agonizingly bad. It's not the kind of bad one can wring humor from. It's just, well, not good.

That's Life stars Heather Paige Kent as 32-year-old Lydia DeLucca, Italian-American resident of northern New Jersey and, by the middle of the first episode, freshman college student at Montville University. A 32-year-old freshman! A working-class 32-year-old freshman! "My, how the laughs will flow," chuckled executive producer Anita Addison as she thought up this premise.

Which is only the first miscalculation of many. Let's put these up on the blackboard for the whole class.

First: Anyone who has even set foot on an American state college campus in the last twenty years knows that a 32-year-old freshman, let alone one as obviously comely as Heather Paige Kent, would not stand out. State colleges are covered in people well past high school graduation. State schools would have to post National Guard snipers at the doors to keep them out.

Second: State colleges are also wallpapered with working class students. It's been decades, possibly generations, since college was only for the privileged. State colleges are, for all intents and purposes, second high schools. Nearly everyone living above the poverty level ends up at a state school for at least a few semesters.

Adding up our first and second factors we find that what we have in That's Life is a fish-in-water story, which is probably even less interesting than the hackneyed fish-out-of-water story we've all come to loathe. Worse, the script thinks it's a fish-out-of-water story, proving that at least this batch of screenwriters didn't make it to Teleplays 102 their freshman year, possibly because their state school didn't offer such advanced coursework.

As we begin the first episode, then, we know the premise is blown. At its heart it wants to be a half-hour sitcom -- and a dated one at that -- but it could still be a good show if That's Life perhaps offered us a realistic look at juggling working for a bare-minimum living, dealing with one's family, and going to college. Allow me to add to our equation, then, miscalculations three and four.

Third: If you want your cast to appear to be Italian-Americans in New Jersey, it would pay to hire some actual Italian-Americans from New Jersey. Or, really, almost anyone from within the white-flight blast radius of Brooklyn. Alas, Ellen Burstyn plays Lydia's Italian-American mother, Ellen Burstyn being about as Italian as Pope John Paul II. Paul Sorvino plays Lydia's father, which almost works, because he really is Italian-American; except that no matter how you dress him, Paul Sorvino doesn't look like New Jersey working class. He looks like a wealthy Brooklynite who moved to New Jersey to get away from all the Italians.

Heather Paige Kent herself looks like, well, like someone with three first names. Blue collar Italian? I don't think so, unless by blue collar you mean someone who's on the B list at Spago.

In fact the only person who looks, talks, and acts like they're really from the New York City metropolitan area is certified New Yorker Debi Mazar. This girl's accent could cut steel. I've always loved Debi and I'm glad to see her getting work, but, Deb, you've got to choose your projects more carefully. Debi plays herself, as always, with aplomb and elan and other words not usually heard around Queens. Here in That's Life she's called Jackie O'Grady and she is, of course, Lydia's best friend, because Debi Mazar is always some other actress' best friend.

Fourth: Realism, or even a semblance of it, requires that your characters talk like actual human beings. This means that a line like "I don't want to have kids right away, I want to make something of myself!" has to go. Preferably, it shouldn't have even arrived so that it has to be removed, but these things do sometimes happen.

Realism also requires that you populate the background with believable extras. This might require doing a little research -- for example, actually visiting a college campus in New Jersey. The creators of That's Life chose to skip this step, instead dropping in students who might be perfect for Los Angeles but look just plain stupid for the East Coast. I'm willing to bet that there isn't one single state college student east of the Mississippi -- heck, east of Carlsbad Caverns -- still wearing a mohawk, but there he is, off in the background of Montville University. I was rather surprised to discover that the college scenes for the show were shot on location at UCLA; I thought they were on a backlot. It takes a lot of work to make a real place look like something you built yourself.

So, summing up: We have a lead actress who cannot be believed, surrounded by an unrealistic family and friends who are possibly confused about their exact geographic location, speaking unrealistic dialogue on unconvincing sets, revolving through a situation so uninteresting and unrelated to the real world as to make the surface of Mars appear germane to my choice of lunch. Total: A bad show. Jaw-droppingly bad? No. Stunningly, cripplingly bad? No. Just plain old run-of-the-mill mediocre not-very-good bad.

I find at this point that I have detailed the situation but not the specifics of the first episode. No matter -- I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Bette Midler has left her busy schedule of touring the world, warbling 1940s-era showtunes, to star in a show called Bette, where she plays a character called "Bette Midler" and warbles 1940s-era show tunes.

If you look up Bette Midler in the Internet Movie Database, the first things you get told are that she's 55 and that she once performed her cabaret act at "the famed gay men's club, The Continental Baths."

So how come Bette debuted at number one in its time slot? How did it draw almost sixteen million viewers? Has the American viewing been pining for an aging camp icon to engage in gentle self-mockery? Beats me. I figured it wouldn't pull any ratings at all, but maybe Bette's performance on Carson's penultimate show got her more public acclaim than I thought.

The more you know about Bette Midler, the more you'll enjoy Bette. And I don't say that lightly. When Miss Midler looks in a mirror and sighs "I look like the last twenty minutes of 'For The Boys,'" it's important that you understand that the old-age makeup at the end of that movie looked silly. It would also help if you knew that the makeup was widely mocked.

What seems odd to me about this is that "For The Boys" came out nine years ago and only made seventeen million dollars. And while I approve of "topical" jokes that don't necessarily revolve around the usual sitcom themes of quoting popular commercials, I have to ask how many people are going to get that joke. And there are a lot of jokes like that.

Bette is not without a certain charm, however, because the show seems to understand that it's a weird little special-interest operation. Early in the first show, Bette's daughter's boyfriend says "Wow, gee, I can't tell you what an honor this is. I have all your albums. I've seen all your movies. Really, I'm your biggest fan." Bette leans over to her daughter and whispers, "He's gay." That got a big, somewhat nervous laugh.

The other reason it's watchable is because Bette Midler is a lot of fun to watch. Whether making jokes about having been nominated for an Oscar but losing to Sally Field or bouncing around on exercise equipment, she seems to be having fun. And she's got a lot of energy. This can not be overstressed: she has lots and lots of energy. Oh my, yes. And she's not afraid of looking silly on-screen. Which is a good thing, because too many sitcoms follow the Friends model of pretty people sitting around. The world could use more people willing to debase themselves for my amusement.

I also approve of the straightforwardness involved in Bette Midler starring as herself in a show called Bette. If she's anything like me (and, come to think of it, she's almost nothing like me), she occasionally searches for her name on Internet search engines, and this should really increase her hits. Every article about the show, positive or negative, can be summed up as Bette Bette Bette Bette Bette. When I figure out a way to get people parroting my name like that, I'll be well on my way to taking over the world.

Bette appears to be married in this show, and may or may not be married in real life. This confuses me because she's called "The Divine Miss M," but I guess "The Divine Mrs. M" doesn't have the same ring to it. The guy playing her husband does a good job of staying out of Bette's way, which is pretty much the job of everyone in the cast. The pilot had one scene without Bette in it; guess who was mentioned in every line in that scene.

I enjoyed a lot. I was one of the eight or nine people that saw "For The Boys," so I got that joke. I enjoyed Bette's jazzy up-tempo version of Kid Rock's "Bawitdaba," and I even enjoyed Bette's strained banter with Special Guest Star Danny DeVito. I get the impression this show will have lots of Special Guest Stars to emphasize how very Hollywood Bette Midler is.

And that's a good thing. Because apparently what the country is hungering for is glamorous Hollywood stars (like Danny De Vito? Oh well.) and clever japes about the relative merits of "The Rose" and "Beaches." And singing!

I went into Titans with the most positive mindset possible. Sure, it was a prime-time soap opera from Aaron Spelling. But NBC chose to bill it as "this year's guilty pleasure," suggesting that the series will be campy fun for the in-on-the-joke crowd. And besides which, that Yasmine Bleeth is easy on the eyes.

Oh, I was so mistaken. Except about the Yasmine Bleeth part.

There were a few ways the producers of Titans could have gone. First, they could've chosen to do a winking, campy soap opera parody. It probably would've been a flop, but it might have been interesting -- and could've developed into a cult hit. Or they could've chosen to produce it straight, using slick production values and an updated sense of how savvy the television audience has gotten to make a new soap opera for the '00s, one that's smarter and nastier.

But Spelling's crew chose a different tack. Or, to put it more accurately, a very familiar tack. Because Titans, like many of the godawful soaps that have come before it (in prime time and daytime), is a leaden piece of hackwork. There are fan-written Star Trek scripts out there with more depth, realism, and crackling dialogue than the Titans pilot.

Titans' ludicrous dialogue is mixed with a ridiculously convoluted set of character relationships -- which might be funny if it weren't so painful to watch. Not one piece of dialogue, at least in the pilot episode, can refrain from being expository. "Hey, big brother," says one character to another, identifying their familial ties in a way surely not to be noticed as artificial by Titans viewers, "you're the businessman." Or, "So, sis, how's it going?"/"Great. I haven't had a drink in five weeks!"

If you think you've spotted a future plot point, in which the sister falls off the wagon, you're sorely mistaken. Because Titans can't resist setting up plot contrivances on the ol' fencepost and knocking them over one by one. The sister falls off the wagon halfway through the episode.

I never watched prime time soaps, not even as a kid. (I did watch Days of Our Lives for a few years in elementary school and high school, but the less said about that the better.) And yet, for some reason, I have misty watercolored memories of Dallas and Dynasty. Perhaps if I watched them today, I'd realize that they were just as awful as Titans.

And yet, Titans reminded me just how low television can really sink when it puts its mind to it. This is unapologetic junk, clearly targeted at an audience with absolutely no sense of cliché and no ability to detect obvious plot contrivances. It literally lowers your IQ as you watch. After half an hour, I had to take a break, get my bearings, and after a reasonable waiting period -- sort of like a diver pausing halfway to the surface in order to prevent getting the bends -- continue my hour of despair.

At its root, we can lay the blame for Titans at the feet of its writers. But we must not forget its untalented ensemble cast, most of whom manage to take the dialogue that has been written for them and smash it into a million pieces. Casper Van Dien, who has made a career out of looking handsome and saying little (yeah, he was one of the genetically engineered soldiers in "Starship Troopers"), is decked out in a white Navy uniform here -- this one's for you, gals! -- but unfortunately speaks a bit too much. Yasmine Bleeth, while still attractive, seems to be lost without the silliness of a Nash Bridges or Baywatch in the atmosphere.

The show's two older leads are an interesting contrast. Perry King, of Riptide fame, is actually not bad -- only a little stiff -- as rich man Richard Williams, president of Williams Global Enterprises, the generically named corporation whose job it is to feed money into the plots of Titans. Which doesn't say much, because he's getting killed off in a couple of weeks and being replaced by Jack Wagner, a soap opera veteran who will undoubtedly try to chew the scenery as much as possible.

And then there's poor Victoria Principal. Perhaps my implausible rosy-glow feelings about Dallas have rubbed off on her, too. But now the harsh light of reality is shining on Principal, and I know why she hasn't gotten much work since Dallas. The answer? She's really not a very good actress. Quite bad, actually. One might even say awful.

And the same can be said for Titans as a whole. The show's producers evidently don't understand that fun is part of the camp equation, and Titans is not any fun. It's deadly serious -- and I emphasize the term deadly.

Rare are the times that a form of creative endeavor comes up with so evocative an establishing shot -- Orson Welles clutching a snow globe in "Citizen Kane," William Holden floating face down in a swimming pool in "Sunset Boulevard," Sheryl Lee's body wrapped in plastic on Twin Peaks. Could Nikki rise to the level of artistic achievement reached by those other masterworks? Could it fulfill the promise of grandeur hinted at it in its opening moments?

Soon, however, Cox is wearing both pants and a t-shirt, and the disappointed viewer is left to mourn what might have been.

"I'm not a stripper. I'm a dancer," Cox says in a line that simultaneously offers expository information about her character while twisting the knife in the hearts of her male admirers. "I'm not a stripper-dancer, but a dancer-dancer."

And at this point, the heartbroken viewer must conclude that Nikki is, in fact, the worst show ever.

Actually -- disappointment over seeing Nikki suitably dressed aside -- it's not as bad as all that. Oh, Nikki isn't very good -- we are talking about a WB sitcom here -- but it doesn't set any land-speed records for awful. Nikki is rather quite inoffensive in its blandness. Sure, it's tripe, but it doesn't claim to be anything else, and no animals were harmed in the making of this show, so lighten up, OK? They can't all be gems, folks.

Which is a shame, really, because Nikki Cox deserves a better showcase for her talents. Once you get past the tawny tresses, the 1,000-watt smile, the pneumatic body proportions -- and it took me several hours and a couple of stiff drinks, believe me -- you'll see that Nikki Cox is actually a promising comedic actress. She was the best thing about the wretched Happily Ever After. She had a great guest-spot on The Drew Carey Show. She even acquitted herself nicely on Norm, a show that makes the living envy the dead.

Nikki Cox has a fine sense of comic timing, a winning on-screen presence and the skill to rise above the pedestrian material she's been saddled with to date. One day, some quick-thinking producer will smack his forehead mid-power lunch and say, "Damnit! We've been wasting our lives trying to build sitcoms around Kirstie Alley and Bette Midler and Christine-freakin'-Baranski. Let's give that nice Nikki Cox gal a halfway decent show to work on so Michaels won't have to watch her on TV with the lights dimmed and the shades drawn to keep the neighbors from seeing while he rocks back and forth murmuring, "Unclean... unclean..." and--

Um... Perhaps I've said too much.

Nikki centers on the wacky adventures of the pulchritudinous Cox and her gi-normous husband, Dwight, played by the gi-normous Nick von Esmarch. The pilot episode recapped how these two crazy kids met. Nikki crashed Dwight's going-on-off-to-college party and stowed away in his car because she needed a ride to Vegas. Dwight's headed to Pepperdine, see, where he's going to major in "corporate tax law" (with a minor, no doubt, in "contrived TV major"), and Nikki needs to get to Las Vegas to audition as a dancer -- a dancer-dancer, mind you, and not the other, more telegenicly interesting form of dancing. Somewhere on the road to Malibu, she convinces Dwight to ditch college and go to professional wrestling school, also conveniently located in Las Vegas. None of this sits too well with Dwight's mom, who has a hard time digesting the news that: 1) her son is ditching college for the glamorous life of pro wrestling; 2) sonny boy also married a woman he just met at a party; and 3) Nikki Cox is fully clothed throughout the episode.

Oh wait. I'm the one who's having a problem with that last one.

Much of the remainder of Nikki's pilot -- and, in all likelihood, all future episodes -- deals with Nikki and Dwight and Mom and their hilarious quarrels. Nikki thinks Dwight needs to follow his dreams. Mom thinks Nikki needs to get lost. Dwight thinks they should all just try to get along.

Philip thinks Nikki shouldn't have ditched that shiny green bikini five minutes into the episode.

Von Esmarch does a surprisingly good job as Dwight, keeping pace with Cox in the comic timing department. Sadly, the two have very little on-screen chemistry, leading me to conclude that von Esmarch must have died halfway through shooting the pilot.

Fresh off her triumph as Mary Todd Lincoln in The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, Christine Estabrook portrays Mom. Whoever advises her on what roles to take needs to stop.

The actors aren't the problem here. They do the best they can with what they have to work with. Sadly, what they have to work with is slop, straight out of a Sitcom Writing 101 seminar where a typical Wings episode would be dismissed as "too highbrow." Nothing can rescue material like that. Not good comic timing. Not believable on-screen chemistry.

Not even Nikki Cox in that shiny green bikini. And if that can't make the world right, what hope do the rest of us have?

A half-hour of paranoiacs, an insecure therapist, and her jerk boyfriend? Sign me up! I mean, who wouldn't want to spend their evenings laughing at seriously mentally ill people? It's not like there isn't a rich history of entertainingly deranged people in prime time, you know.

But that's the problem. As far as derangements go, paranoia just isn't that cinematic. Or funny. It's one thing to be convinced that there are purple monkeys living in your car's glove compartment. That can lead to all sorts of, I don't know, purple monkey jokes. Multiple Personality Disorder is a natural for a show starring some young Jim Carrey-wannabe. And what was Robin Williams doing in Mork and Mindy if not giving us a stark and tragic portrait of manic-depression in aliens?

But paranoia generally manifests itself as huddling in a corner, hoping that you can't be seen. At least in The Trouble With Normal it does. These aren't the kind of loons that make web pages about the CIA Automatic Mind Control Hypno-Rays; these are the kind of loons that, er, stand around and whine to each other. I guess.

The two main paranoiacs are Bob (played by David Krumholtz) and Zach (played by Jon Cryer). Bob is a quiet, cringing kind of guy. Zach is a jumpy, energetic Jon Cryer character. It's a shame that Bob appears to be the main character, since Zach is a lot more fun to watch. When someone says "Shh!" and everyone freezes (this happens a lot in shows about paranoia), Bob just freezes, looking scared. So does Zach, but at least his eyes bounce back and forth a lot.

By the way, if you haven't figured it out yet, when a review is reduced to praising Jon Cryer's bouncy eyeballs, that means there isn't much else to like.

Bob and Zach both have wacky sidekicks. Bob's is named Max, and he's a tall slow guy. Zach's is named Stansfield, and he's a fat dumb guy. Stansfield is even wackier than Zach. So to recap: Bob and Max, who are quiet and slow, are our two main paranoiacs. The emergency backup paranoiacs, who tragically get less screen time, are Zach and Stansfield, and are jumpy and dumb.

There's also a therapist, named Claire, who is insecure. That's all. Just insecure. She has a boyfriend named Jackson, who's a jerk. I know I mentioned them earlier in almost the same words, but that's pretty much it for them. One scene ends with Claire leaning against a door, wondering if she'll ever be able to bring sanity to these poor people. And they fade out. Whoo! What a punch line that scene had!

That was the scene just before the closing credits, too.

Now that it's the year 2000 (you might have read something about this in the newspaper), it's to be expected that sitcoms are reaching for new situations from which to wring comedy. And what could be more twenty-first century than mistrust? We've got two shows (Dark Angel and Freedom) set in vaguely post-apocalyptic/totalitarian futures, so why not have a show based in today's world, starring the sort of character that believes we're already in a dark, totalitarian future?

Well, for one thing, these guys (and I don't think we actually need all four of them) don't have the courage of their lunacy. The whole reason that Claire is in the show, aside from the requirement for sex jokes, is because all four of the guys are in therapy. So they're paranoid, but they feel bad about it. They're trying to get over their irrational fears. This, of course, is a laudable goal, but what happens to the show if they succeed? The only thing the show has going for it now is the paranoia; if the main characters get over it, all we're left with is a quiet guy, a slow guy, a dumb guy, and a jumpy guy.

The therapy sessions have extra characters, because The Bob Newhart Show showed us decades ago that therapy sessions can be funny. Of course, those therapy sessions had Bob Newhart in them, which is just one of the missing ingredients here. Another difference is that in The Bob Newhart Show, the patients never seemed all that interested in getting over their problems. They just came on screen, acted out their hilarious dysfunctionalities, and got out. It's no surprise that The Trouble With Normal's therapy sessions aren't as funny as The Bob Newhart Show's. But it's a little disappointing that they couldn't be as funny as, say, the sessions from the Judd Hirsch vehicle Dear John.

In theory, I could wait for future episodes before I criticize the show's prospects for long-term success. But I've carefully considered my options, and I believe that a sudden rush to judgement would be the correct action. So here goes: I don't see how they expect a show based around a quiet guy and his quiet friend and their quiet therapist to be successful, paranoia or no. It's not the first time that the wacky neighbor has been more entertaining than the putative star, but it is the first time I can remember that the wacky neighbor's wacky sidekick is funnier than the main character. When the jerk boyfriend turns out to be working for the government and is really spying on them, well, don't expect me to drop my pants in shock.

Except for the fact that this guy had suffered one of those occasional brain freezes that are best avoided when dealing with high corrosives. The sulfuric acid was located on the walls of the classroom and instead of bringing over the entire bottle, one person in the group was supposed to pour a limited amount into another container and bring that to your bench.

However, our partner, a man who harbored aspirations of medical school, looked past the required diluted acid and brought us a graduated cylinder poured from the bottle marked "CONCENTRATED" in big red letters.

We carried on, blisfully unaware of our impending doom, until the instructions called for dropping magnesium strips to the broth. According to the directions, we were to "carefully" add one pinch of magnesium at a time in order to watch the reaction as it took place. Unfortunately for the scientific method, our group was running late and we unceremoniously dumped the entire dish of magensium into the beaker.

The very same beaker which contained a sulfuric acid concoction six times more powerful than it should have been.

It was like running a can of soda through a paint shaker and then opening it. We began having visions of that scene in "Alien" where the creature's acid blood spills onto the ship's deck and nearly eats all the way through the hull.

That's when the gas hit us.

A malevolent gray mushroom cloud burst over the lab bench and drifted straight down our windpipes. This wasn't like getting a sniff of porta-potties on a parking lot in Vegas in August, this was flat-out noxious.

Our eyes watered, our nostrils burned and we spent the better part of ten minutes hacking up chunks of lung. One breath of that smorgasbord of toxins and our brain stems took control -- we clawed our way toward the window in a primal battle for fresh air and survival.

Watching Tucker is a lot like that.

Airing Monday nights on NBC, Tucker doesn't just reek of incompetence like most other new shows. No, this program is a toxic cocktail of slime that's like a boot to the Adam's apple.

The story revolves around a smart kid named Malcolm who talks to the camera and lives with his domineering mother, pushover father and thuggish brother. Hilarity ensues.

Wait, I'm sorry. That's not quite right. This story revolves around a smart kid named Tucker who talks to the camera and lives with his domineering aunt, pushover uncle and thuggish cousin. Hilarity is nowhere to be found.

You see, they are totally different shows.

Fourteen-year-old Tucker is played by Eli Marienthal, who looks like he just disconnected from the Project: TELEGENIC nutrient interface over at Disney Genetic Labs. Tucker is a Frankenstein's monster of TV Kid Clichés: clever without being nerdy, wide-eyed with just a splash of skater rebellion, mischievous but with a heart of gold.

Tucker and his mom are forced to move in with Aunt Claire, played by Katey Sagal. Claire is Jane Kazmareck's character in Malcolm... just substitute the charm with a touch of bitch. The result is not a character that people love to hate, it's a character that people loathe with the same kind of medulla-based paranoid obsession usually reserved for spiders, snakes and clowns.

Tucker shares his room with a dolt of a cousin who makes a habit of spying on their beautiful neighbor and classmate, McKenna. Tucker immediately sets out to win McKenna's heart, a dream unlikely to come to fruition since she is dating Seth Green. Not a character played by Seth Green, but Seth Green playing himself.

Granted, getting written off Buffy and starring in "Idle Hands" aren't exactly ego boosts, but there must be some deeper psychosis gnawing away at the formerly respectable Mr. Green. In Buffy he was a fictional character bonking a college girl, now he's himself dating a fourteen-year-old. What must NBC be lording over Green to get him to lend his name to this schlock?

Then again, "schlock" may be too strong a compliment. Baywatch is schlock. Titans is schlock. Yes, Dear is schlock.

Tucker is indeed a miserable concept that is poorly written, badly acted, utterly humorless and startlingly unoriginal. Yet Yes, Dear doesn't make the viewer feel dirty for having watched it. After two episodes of Tucker, I needed to bellyflop into a swimming pool of Lysol.

Consider the first five minutes of the pilot, a Tucker monologue on how he has an erection and how he plans on hiding it from his mom and aunt. Later that night, Tucker's cousin hides in his bed, wearing a wrestling mask and eating peanut butter by the spoonful, watching Tucker undress. Tucker sees his cousin, goes into the bathroom, pulls down his pants and only then discovers his naked aunt in the shower. He covers his crotch with a toliet paper cozy, which he later gives to McKenna to wear as a hat. Claire spends the rest of the episode describing to neighbors how excited her nephew got watching her naked.

Even the Farrelly brothers have their limits. Well, maybe not. But at least they would make it funny.

NBC says Tucker is a coming-of-age story and hopes it will remind viewers of the bittersweet days between childhood and becoming an adult. (This, from the network that cancelled Freaks and Geeks.) Thankfully, judging from the early ratings, Tucker's coming of age will be cancelled just a few weeks into high school and the only memories will be of a toxic cloud and a chemistry experiment gone horribly awry.

Fortunately, the previews for new show Ed were all wrong. The only thing Ed has in common with Providence is a network. The writing is smart, funny and a little bit... weird, and the acting is so effortless and natural, it's easy to get sucked into Stuckeyville, Ed's once-and-again home town.

The premise, for those who missed the promo all eight thousand times it aired on NBC between Olympic profiles, is that lawyer Ed Stevens tires of life in the Big Apple (that he's been fired and has caught his wife in flagrante delicto with a mailman probably had a lot to do with it) and returns to Stuckeyville to rebuild his life as a bowling-alley-owner-cum-lawyer, filling the time between nurturing his business and hanging out with friends by wooing his high school crush, golden girl Carol Vessey. She's currently involved with Ed's former sophomore English teacher, Nick, who's recast himself as a small-town Faulkner and used a lot of artistic license in yanking Carol around.

Carol, now an English teacher at the high school for which she once cheered, is deftly played by Julie Bowen. At first glance, Carol appears to be all shiny blonde hair and cheerleader charm. Bowen tempers the smiles with revealing flashes of temper and insecurity to show someone who's always suspected she doesn't deserve to be the prom queen.

She's a worthy consort for Ed, who's a superlative, if unconventional, suitor. As he says before asking Carol out while clad in a suit of armor, "If you're not born with the broad shoulders and the strong jawline, there's only one way to get the girl. Make a complete ass out of yourself."

Ed does so good-naturedly. Tom Cavanagh plays him as someone who's comfortable with who he is -- an acting move that makes Ed come off like Jon Stewart's goofy-yet-attractive younger brother. Cavanaugh's open, sunny face and wry delivery are fun to watch.

So is the rest of the cast. Leslie Boone plays Ed and Carol's friend Molly with a blithe aplomb that threatens to knock Camryn Manheim out of her spot as America's role model for bodacious beauty. Michael Ian Black, playing loopy bowling alley employee Phil, dances on the fine line between quirky and annoying with ease. The other principal cast members, Josh Randall and Jana Marie Hupp, do a fine job as new parents and Ed's biggest cheerleaders.

The cast is well-served by the writing. In the first courtroom sequence, Ed is defending Molly against a lawsuit brought by a body shop charging her for car modifications she didn't want. As the hometown lawyer gets up in a white suit and begins drawling about "this big-city lawyer with his big-city ways," the judge stops him short. Why, she demands, is he wearing a silly outfit and drawling? It's a hip send-up of classic courtroom scenes.

And that's Ed's final distinction: Ed Stevens gets the same wacky court cases and eccentric clients that the denizens of David E. Kelley shows enjoy, but he treats his clients with respect -- a huge distinction separating him from the folks at the law firm of Cage, Fish, O'Donnell and Quirky. Ed may be nonplussed at the weirdness in which he's become immersed, but he's determined to negotiate it with the three traits that rarely fail him: his humor, his brains and his good heart.

Those three traits also apply to Ed the show. Like Malcolm in the Middle, Ed celebrates the lunacy of everyday life and renders it in fantastic fashion. Given how dull and disappointing the rest of NBC's new shows -- and most of its existing shows -- are, Ed is a lunatic, fantastic show well worth watching.

The Apgar tests, which are used to measure a baby's general well-being after it's born, only measure on a scale from one to ten.

But my former bosses were part of that annoying class of parents who believe raising a child, like all of their other hobbies, had to reflect their habit of over-achieving. These parents are the same bourgeois sheep who strap headphones to the mother's stomach so the fetus can develop a prenatal appreciation for Mozart, insist on feeding their children all-natural foods, and lord it over the folks who dare to use disposable diapers.

As if these irritating parents -- who, frankly, make AKC poodle owners look positively lackadasical in the breeding department -- weren't annoying enough in real life, they're now on television Monday nights. Yes, Dear features two of them, Greg and Kim Warner, played by Anthony Clarke and Jean Louisa Kelly.

Clarke is as inoffensive as strained pears, but Kelly is something else. Based on her ability to stop time for the viewer simply by opening her mouth and shrilling clichés, the federal government should swoop down on Studio City and spirit Kelly away to an underground lab for testing. A superpower like hers should only be unveiled in times of national emergency, not abused in the service of Monday night television.

The other two characters rounding out the ensemble -- Mike O'Malley and Liza Snyder as Jimmy and Christine Hughes-- are the yin to the other couple's überparenting yang. Where Greg and Kim are doing everything they can to turn their infant into a reflection of his overachieving yuppie progenitors, Jim and Christine are practicing the kind of parenting most invertebrates would applaud: spawn the little guys, then let them fend for themselves.

In a normal world, the yuptight and the slacker parents would never, ever meet. The Warners would hang out with other social darwinists and engage in subtle displays of dominance by mentioning their children's Apgar scores, and the Hughes would do what all good invertebrates do: anchor themselves to something and vegetate in front of the television. In sitcom-land, however, the Hughes and Warners are always interacting because Christine and Kim are sisters.

Presumably, the comedy comes from the clashes between the Hughes and Warner parenting philosophies. In the hands of a deft writing team, this might actually work -- the sisters could reflect on how their different personalities and common upbringing have shaped their own mothering styles and we could all have a good laugh at how capriciously shaped one's parenting philosophies are. Unfortunately, we're at the tender mercies of Alan Kirschenbaum and Greg Garcia, and the show stinks. It's not even fun to heckle -- that's how flat the writing is and how poorly the actors react to each other.

CBS will probably boast about the numbers Yes, Dear draws in its comfortable spot between King of Queens and Everybody Loves Raymond. They shouldn't. As my bosses found out, we know the numbers on the scale, and we know when you're lying about the true potential of this new creature you've brought into the world.

This year, that show is certainly not Hype.

Ha ha! Now, you see what I did there? I set up your expectations one way, and then I threw a swerve in, creating what we in the biz call a "joke." Not a particularly good joke, admittedly, but the basic elements are still there: a setup and a punch line. The kids at Hype have apparently decided to discard both halves of the equation.

Hype is a sketch-comedy show on the WB, and it stars ten people I've never heard of and don't expect to ever hear from again. Their press releases claimed that they were going to take a bold new approach to sketch comedy. That approach inevitably includes a "comedic" news report and celebrity impersonations.

The impersonations seem to have no purpose. Why, for example, bring somebody on to pretend to be Janeane Garofalo saying "Kudos to the WB for that insightful political satire. It's a good time to be alive" and nothing else? There's just no joke there. Is the audience supposed to laugh at the mere thought of a Janeane Garofalo impersonator?

And Janeane is one of the more timely targets. Some of the other people to get zinged are William Shatner, Prince William, and Paul Lynde. Paul Lynde! The problem with a second-rate Paul Lynde imitator is that it makes the audience long for the days of Rich Little. Another problem is that the actual Paul Lynde was much funnier than the clown pretending to be him. But then the real Prince William is probably funnier than the poor sap who's going to have to put "major roles: Prince William listening to Britney Spears on the toilet" on his resume.

Of course, the test of every sketch-comedy show is: How good is its Regis Philbin? And the answer here is: Not very good. For one thing, they try to wring laughs out of his asking "Final Answer?" That joke was tired before it got used on the Oscars. Even the boring guy at your company's watercooler has stopped using it as a punch line. He's probably still doing Survivor references, which Hype will get to in another couple episodes. I'm assuming that the WB is so bereft of replacement programming that Hype will last long enough to have three episodes, which it certainly would not have on a real network.

One thing Hype cannot be faulted for is lack of effort. In addition to the ten "stars," there are nine Executive Producers, two Producers, two "Produced By"s, one Co-Producer, and twelve writers. It's a shame that all that effort resulted in jokes comparing Eminem to Vanilla Ice. That joke, incidentally, brought gasps from the audience, which was probably shocked by the viciousness of the attack. Or maybe they were shocked that a show which was promoted as being stocked with gifted impersonators had a guy pretending to be Vanilla Ice.

The Hype audience laughs a lot. This is partly because their never sure what the jokes are. When a show's big laughs are supposed to come from impersonations of George W. and Laura Bush, the audience takes to laughing at nearly random times on the theory that they can't be accused of missing the jokes. But it means that the hapless Internet television reviewer muttering "Was that supposed to be funny? Or was that the joke there? Wait, are these the commercials? Is the show still going?"

One of the things that Hype finds funny is obscenity. Several of its sketches get their theoretical laughs from potty-mouthed characters. Sadly, the obscenity is beeped out, so the joke is just "Look! Random Celebrity cursing!" Another thing they find funny is celebrity impersonations done by people who look and sound absolutely nothing like the people they're impersonating. If the captions didn't tell us that we were watching Whitney Houston, Kurt Loder, and Princess Di, we'd be forced to invent our own celebrities. Come to think of it, that might result in a funnier show.

The pacing of Hype is supposed to result in a funky, fresh feel. The sketches are short, and generally don't fall into the Saturday Night Live eight-minutes-of-dead-horse-beating trap. Sometimes, sketches are introduced with "The Hype Meter", which indicates how hyped (on a scale of Super Hyped, Mega Hyped, and Hyper Hyped) a given topic is. This is a bad sign, because one aspect of being even "Mildly Hyped" is having been the subject of eight minutes of Saturday Night Live foolishness. Of course, the twelve writers seem to think that parodies of "American Beauty" (a movie that came out thirteen months ago) are cutting edge.

Another thing they use to fill space between sketches is cast members saying random things like "this next sketch is gonna piss someone off!" or "Here comes some more good, clean <BEEP> family fun!" Unfortunately, no one says "Sock it to me!" or "Here come de judge." I'm holding out hope that in future episodes, someone bets their bippy.

Comedy isn't all that complicated. Here's an example of a joke from the mid-forties radio show called "Can You Top This?": Mrs. Bloomberg entered her husband's office unannounced and unexpectedly and found his secretary sitting on his lap. "Don't get excited," warned Mr. Bloomberg, sensing trouble, "I didn't want to tell you that business is so bad, I'm studying how to become a ventriloquist!"

That joke is clearly from the forties, because it operates on one of the basic Old Joke premises: all businessmen are having affairs with their secretaries. To operate on Hype Joke premises, it would look like this:

FADE UP

A man in a white wig is sitting at a desk in an undistinguished desk. A caption identifies him as BILL CLINTON. A woman in a long black wig enters.

BILL: Monica Lewinsky, you <beep>. Why don't you come over here and <beep>?

MONICA: <beep>

MONICA LEWINSKY goes to the desk and sits on BILL's lap. A woman in a short blonde wig enters.

BILL: Oh <beep>! My wife Hilary!

HILARY: <thirty seconds of beeping>

FADE OUT

In the interest of journalistic accuracy, I have to admit that one thing on Hype made me laugh out loud: Hype was brought to us by "Blair Witch 2." Now that's funny!

But certainly it cannot be said that television across the board is a wasteland of recycled plots and secondhand conceits. Take the new show The Fugitive, a creative force of stunning plot twists and poignant dramatic peaks that, I dare say, has never before been contemplated in any entertainment medium.

To sum up: Seems there's this fella Kimball. He's some kind of doctor. He's got a hot toddy of a little wife. They love each other. But as luck would have it, this other fella -- no name, but goes by the moniker One Arm -- sneaks into the house one night and offs the lovely Ms. Kimball in a grotesque and hideous manner. Mr. Kimball stumbles in as One Arm is finishing the deed. They scuffle and in the ensuing donnybrook, Kimball pulls off One Arm's prosthetic limb. One Arm -- whose name is never really explained -- flees.

It's at this point that a hulking lox of a lieutenant with the Chicago Police Department, guy by the name of Gerard, enters the picture. The hulking lox is a frighteningly efficient and competent police officer uncowed by shoddy investigation and spectacular leaps in deduction. He does not believe Kimball's tale about One Arm -- again, no explanation for the name -- and immediately and wrongly fixates on Kimball himself. To make a long story short, the hulking lox arrests Kimball, and Kimball is convicted of killing his hot toddy wife.

Fortunately for Kimball, in a startling and unforeseen turn of events, the van taking Kimball to prison overturns. Kimball escapes and becomes what's known as a "fugitive." This is roughly defined as a wrongly convicted man who surfs the web for newspaper articles about "one armed men."

Now, at this point the casual web user may be somewhat skeptical of this tactic. The casual web user may fear that such a search will turn up hundreds if not thousands of potential hits. Worse, the casual web user may fear that such a search will uncover a pornographic web site for freaks. This just proves that the casual web user is an idiot. Kimball's search locates precisely one article about a one-armed man in the Miami Herald, so it is off to south Florida with the hulking lox -- unburdened by other cases, undeterred by the jurisdictional limits of the Chicago Police Department, informed by America's Most Wanted -- in pursuit.

It has been suggested by some that The Fugitive bears some resemblance to the 1994 film "The Fugitive" starring Harrison Ford and the mid-60s television drama The Fugitive starring David Janssen. I find this argument tenuous. Aside from the title, the successful doctors, the hot toddy wives, the loving marriages, the horrific murders, Doc Kimball's struggles with the one-armed man, the thickheaded disbelieving investigators, Cook County's appalling habit of convicting innocent men, our protagonists' flights from justice, the pursuits by a hulking lox, Kimball's solitary and noble search for the real killer, certain plot twists and stunts, and lines of dialogue, there are no similarities at all.

For one thing, in the 1994 film, Kimball is played by Harrison Ford, the biggest box office draw of all time, and Gerard is played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is white and once shared space with Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore at Harvard. In the TV show currently airing, Kimball is played by Tim Daly, who once portrayed David Koresh in a movie of the week. Gerard is played by Mykelti Williamson, who is black and once killed a man. In the film, the vehicle transporting Kimball that crashes is a bus (it crashes into a train); in the TV show, it's a van. In the film, when Gerard has him at gunpoint, Kimball does a half-gainer off an aqueduct into a river below. In the TV show, when Gerard has him at gunpoint, Kimball does a half-gainer off a high-rise onto a net below. In the film, Gerard locates Kimball through the ludicrous device of telling his nitwit assistant to find a federal judge, say they need a bunch of wiretaps, and they'll explain why later. In the TV show, Gerard locates Kimball through the ludicrous device of examining a picture of a wrench and concluding, much to his nitwit assistant's amazement, that Kimball is working at a high-rise construction site. In the film, Kimball saves Gerard's life by clocking a would-be assailant in the back of the head with a pipe. In the TV show, Kimball saves Gerard's life by clocking a would-be assailant in the back of the head with a wrench. In the film, Kimball saves a young boy's life by ordering emergency surgery while in full flight. In the TV show, Kimball saves a young woman's life by performing an emergency medical procedure while in full flight. Perhaps most importantly, in the film, Kimball alters his appearance by dying his hair and cutting his beard. In the TV show, Kimball just dyes his hair.

See? Completely different.

Still, notwithstanding these clear differences, there are bound to be some unforgiving cynics out there who will stubbornly insist on comparing the merits of "The Fugitive"(s). Despite my personal belief that this would be like comparing Hooters waitresses and Hawaiian Tropic girls, I will endeavor to provide some insights.

It could be said, I suppose, that The Fugitive is a paler, weaker, more sickly, less daring, less clever, in certain ways more implausible version of The Fugitive and "The Fugitive." Or a healthier, more robust, more adventurous variant of The Pretender. Indeed, if I were to rank them in order of accomplishment, it probably would go like this: "The Fugitive," The Fugitive, The Fugitive. The best illustration of the relative merits of "The Fugitive" and The Fugitive lies in perhaps the most famous exchange. In the film, when Kimball yells at Gerard "I didn't kill my wife!" Gerard utters the classic, pithy response, "I don't care." In the TV show, when Kimball yells at Gerard "I didn't kill my wife!" Gerard launches into a meandering, unfocused discourse about how in our American system of justice the ultimate responsibility for deciding such matters lies with the jury, and the jury in Kimball's case has adjudicated him guilty, yada, yada, yada.

Lacks... pithiness.

(In all fairness, the line would not work in the TV show because there Gerard was also the investigator who initially arrested Kimball and thus he must or should care, whereas in the movie Gerard is just a Deputy U.S. Marshal who is unknowingly helping perpetuate some other guy's screw-up and therefore he can legitimately pass the buck. This is an unwieldy explanation, of course, but it is no less unwieldy than Gerard's jury monologue, which just proves my point: screw civics lessons. Since Gerard already got it wrong once, the correct response from his perspective should have been "Yes, you did.")

Finally, a word about The Fugitive's likelihood of success. In this respect, I find instructive the first season of the CBS reality-based program Survivor. Survivor, you will recall, was a ratings smash during its original run because we, the viewing public, were captivated by the suspense: will they or won't they bounce the sinister fat guy? However, once we learned that the sinister fat guy not only didn't get bounced, but in fact made off with the booty, nothing -- not even the pain of a tape-delayed Olympic marathon -- could make us tune in again. Survivor thus teaches that once suspense is removed from the equation, we really could care less if Kelly, Susan, Richard, Sean, or anyone else in their contemptible lot dies in a fiery bus crash.

See, a fiery bus crash -- the parallels here should be obvious.

The show is not called Madrigal Men. And nobody sings. No "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In." No "It's A Long Way To Tipperary." They don't sing crap.

And my second disappointment? That came when I actually had to sit through Madigan Men.

It's not that Madigan Men is a particularly hateful sitcom. It's not even the worst show ABC airs on its rebuilt Friday night lineup -- although when you share the Friday schedule with Norm, that's hardly a distinction you want to put on your resumé.

But while Madigan Men looks like Emmy fodder alongside the likes of Two Guys and a Girl, that doesn't make it a good show. Instead, Madigan Men is paint-by-the-numbers comedy, nothing you haven't seen before in a thousand other forgettable shows: a newly divorced architect tries to jump back into the dating pool, while raising his teenaged son and enduring advice from his meddlesome father. Madigan Men's twist on this twice-told tale? It's banal with an Irish lilt.

That lilt comes courtesy of Gabriel Byrne, who plays the divorced dad. Byrne, who's made his bones by portraying moody mopes, seems grimly out of place here, eager to wring laughs of Madigan Men's thin material but too gloomy to succeed.

"Since when do you eat hot dogs?" asks best pal Grant Shaud, whose voice has not become any less grating since leaving Murphy Brown.

"Since my wife left me for a nutritionist," replies Byrne in Madigan Men's first joke. "It's payback time."

Payback time for whom? The nutritionist? Or the folks who have to listen to this drivel?

The cast also features John Hensley as Byrne's son -- one of those smart-alecky kids who only exist on TV because if they talked like that in real life, they'd be beaten beyond recognition. There's also Shaud and -- in the pilot, at least -- a woman who gives the former Miles Silverberg a run for his money in the "Voice That Sets Off Car Alarms" competition. Sabrina Lloyd of Sports Night is supposed to join the cast in future episodes, and, hopefully, she'll bring some earplugs.

Roy Dotrice holds down the role of Byrne's father, Seamus -- a name the writers no doubt arrived at after rejecting Paddy O'Mick for its subtlety and nuance. Ever the hammy Mick, Dotrice tackles his role with the Gaelic bluster, firing off aphorisms like "A good horse pulls his own cart," and "The road is always shorter when two people walk it," and "You can't judge a man by the thickness of his brogue, but by the size of his cliché."

OK, he didn't say that last one. But he could have.

You can fill entire library shelves with books devoted to the various travails and tragedies the Irish have had to endure. Famines. Bloodshed. Internecine warfare. Add to that list the TV networks' insistence on portraying the Sons of Erin as a bunch of dim-witted, big-hearted slobs with as much fondness for quaint sayings as they have for the drink. Madigan Men isn't the biggest offender -- not after the Great Irish-Themed Show Epidemic of '98 -- but it still treads the same tired trail blazed by other blarney-filled offerings.

(Being partly Irish myself, I appreciate all of network TV's attention. But where are the shows that exploit my German and Polish heritage for ratings gain? The German show could be about a boisterous, menacingly efficient family where zany Grandpa is always muttering about annexing Czechoslovakia. And the Polish-themed show could be about... I don't know, guys trying to change a lightbulb every week?)

But what's objectionable about Madigan Men isn't the fact that ABC could show a couple of Paddies getting looped in a pub outside Dublin for 30 minutes and treat the Irish with more dignity. It's that I've watched one episode of the show, and I can pretty much guess how it plays out from here. Dad and son will quarrel. Grandpa will meddle. Dad and son and Grandpa will bond. And Dad will have quite the adventures wooing the ladies.

It's somewhat disturbing watching a show co-executive produced by Gabriel Byrne that features the recently divorced Byrne playing a recently divorced man who's constantly being told by everyone what a catch he is. Would that every lovesick man could score his own half-hour show to toot his horn about what a wonderful suitor he'd make if only there was some woman out there sensible enough to give him the chance.

And who knows? Every lovesick man might get his own show. ABC will certainly have holes to fill on its Friday night schedule after a few more weeks of this pabulum.

Of course, if the ghostly specter of Two Guys and a Girl hasn't frightened you away from ABC earlier in the evening, chances are you're going to stick around for Madigan Men at 9:30. God's mercy on you, then. Because like they say back in the old country, bland shows are like homemade whiskey; too much of either and you'll need to get your stomach pumped.

Seamus Madigan didn't say that one, either. But he should have.

Along comes Darren Star, the former protege/spawn of Aaron Spelling and a prolific soap opera producer himself whose credits include Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. He is also the creator of the WB's new Grosse Pointe, a comedy that is supposed to be a behind-the-scenes look at 90210. One does not cross Aaron Spelling, however.

If you believe the rumors surrounding the show, Spelling called Star with an offer he couldn't refuse: soften up the show, especially the Tori Spelling-like Marcy Sternfield, or wake up with the head of Shannen Doherty in his bed.

The result is a show that skips the sleek and jumps straight to the gelatinous blob stage. It's definitely not the worst thing on television this fall, but considering the focus of the show and the long experience of its creator, Grosse Pointe could have been so much more.

Grosse Pointe is also the title of the fictional teen soap opera around which the behind-the-scenes plots revolve. In fact, the funniest parts of the real show are scenes from the fake show -- the scary thing is that they're hard to distinguish from an actual 90210 episode.

The majority of Grosse Pointe deals with the actors' lives when they're not on camera. There's the idiotic surfer boy, the "teenage hunk" with a hairpiece, the manipulative bitch, and the fresh-faced blonde newcomer who dreams of Broadway.

Lindsay Sloane's Marcy is amusing for the first five minutes of the show, then her character's constant whining makes her as annoying as the real Tori Spelling. It's no wonder Aaron Spelling wanted the show toned down and it would be interesting to see what Marcy was originally supposed to be.

The viewing public may love Hollywood products, but when that product is Hollywood itself, viewers change the channel. Anyone remember Action, last year's Hollywood-based sitcom that was one of the best comedies in years? It brought in PBS-like ratings and quickly ended up in the same unmarked grave as Conrad Bloom. True, the Grosse Pointe characters don't curse like drunken longshoremen, but then again, Action was actually funny.

The problem with Grosse Pointe is that the actor characters are just as soap opera as the characters those actors are supposed to be playing. The plot lines from the behind-the-scenes stuff are just as convoluted as the stories from the show the characters are supposed to be performing in. I assume this is all supposed to be ironically funny, but it ends up looking like the creators just built a soap opera about a soap opera.

Grosse Pointe had the potential to be a very funny show, but if you want truly laugh-out loud soaps comedy there's only one place to turn: NBC's Passions.

Witness Girlfriends. Or, better yet, don't.

Executive produced by that noted scion of black culture, Kelsey Grammer, Girlfriends feels like nothing so much as any one of the thousands of Friends rip-offs that appeared a few years ago, with the tint badly askew and the script run through the junior copyediting desk at Vibe. Less a black Sex and the City and more a steaming pile of crap, Girlfriends is twelve shades of awful, from the pale cowardice of its presentation of black issues to the dark center of its deeply unfunny heart. Girlfriends is flat-out bad, no matter your color, your gender or your ability to dress yourself in the morning.

In fact, if anything makes Girlfriends stand out, it's how astonishingly generic it is. The show apparently considers such concepts as "black" to be skin deep: you could easily replace any aspect of the show -- the sex of its characters, their ethnicity, their jobs, their relationships -- with substitutes pulled randomly out of a hat and not make a noticeable difference. Six months ago, the flapping of butterfly wings could have turned Girlfriends into a vehicle for Kirk Cameron.

Here: if a white, overweight, married, rapidly-approaching-middle-age father of two can pick up every reference and noodle out every motivation in a show supposedly aimed at hip, young black women, either he watches a hell of a lot of Oprah or Girlfriends is as much about the black female experience as Daddio is about nuclear arms control.

Even the single, lonely stab that this black, female show makes at something uniquely black and female is bungled. When a woman refuses a date with someone darker than herself, she's accused of self-hatred. Hey! A legitimate issue! Something to... Oh, wait. The problem's dealt with in two minutes of tepid confrontation, an admission of "issues" and a suggestion of therapy. Phew! Got that out of the way -- back to the ass jokes! Be sure and tune in next week, when Girlfriends tackles sickle cell anemia.

But Girlfriends is not supposed to be a manifesto on sisterhood and its discontents -- it's supposed to be a sitcom. Or so the press release says. It's hard to tell in the mirthless, echoing silence that surrounds it.

The dialogue is grindingly awful, either ABC-Friday-Night bland or so weighted down with so many weak black culture references that it becomes parody. Where a line of Boy Meets World dialog might run, "Hey, how's it going?" a line of Girlfriends dialog manages, "Hey, how's it going, my brother?" Seriously. Random references to Nelson Mandela, Walter Mosley and Destiny's Child seem dropped in haphazardly, without justification or meaning, just so you remember who the show is aimed at. When a character searches for a date on the Internet, she goes to blackstuds.com. When another warns her off the idea, she cites an article she read in Black Detective Magazine. Not only does Girlfriends apparently consider this the deep cultural bond it has to offer to audience, but also thinks it's knee-slappingly hilarious.

The acting is high-school-capable, with all the awkward transitions and stumbling entrances of a sophomore-year production of "Our Town" but minus the walking into set walls and falling into the orchestra pit. Maybe these actresses are all Oscar-caliber comedic geniuses -- y'know, like Whoopie Goldberg -- but it's hard to tell with what they're given to work with. The only one who managed any on-screen spark in the reviewed episode -- and this may be only because she had the least face-time -- was Persia White's Lynn. Rebellious and a little bit angry, she's the only character who managed to raise her voice with anything approaching emotion. As a bonus, she's also the only character not swiped from cast-off episodes of The Golden Girls.

Not that it helps much. The show is a disaster. Superficially black at best, female in wardrobe only, unfunny from start to finish, Girlfriends is an embarrassment to its race. The human race.