November 2000 Archives

The WB's got problems. Here's the surprising part: They're the hey-we're-a-real-network-now kind of problems, in that all of the net's new shows this season (Gilmore Girls, Grosse Pointe, Hype, Nikki and ABC cast-off Sabrina, the Teenage Witch), as well as the returning favorites (Angel, Charmed, Felicity, Popular and Roswell), are doing so well that they're all getting picked up. Yeah, it's weird.

Thing is, The WB -- which plans on finally turning an actual profit next season, the net's sixth in business -- can't quite afford 'em. Just like when you pump three or five bucks of gas into your car's tank before payday, The WB is ordering new episodes in fours, sixes and eights, instead of the traditional network TV "back nine," which combines with the original block of 13 to make up a full season of 22 episodes.

It's an enviable dilemma, really, and it couldn't happen to a cooler network. The WB has never had a programming line-up as good as this year's, and the best show on any network at this very moment is Gilmore Girls, a smart and sweetly off-center comedy-drama hour that more than a few of you have caught at least part of.

Gilmore Girls is suicidally slotted against NBC's Friends on Thursday nights, and it's become standard practice amongst brighter viewers to flip the channel the millisecond Friends (which isn't really that good anymore, just habit) is over to avoid any glimpse of the soon-to-be-canceled crapfest known as Cursed, which follows. You can hear remote controls lacerating across the neighborhood at the half-hour, whether they're switching to The WB, elsewhere, or just (gasp!) off. The WB is so aware of the fact that those Friends viewers are ripe for the picking, they run a recap of Gilmore Girls' first half before starting the second half. Seriously.

Is 30 minutes of Gilmore Girls really better than a full 60 minutes of any other show on TV? Yes, and let us count the reasons why:

1. Lauren Graham. My TV love (which is different from real love, but only slightly) for Graham knows no bounds, and now that she's finally starring in a show that doesn't suck (Townies, M.Y.O.B, you name it) and will stick around for a full season, I'm positively smitten. In fact, I'm so full of smit, I'd watch an hour of her just buttering toast -- gladly even two hours for the Very Special Christmas Toast episode. But there's more to this than just the hottie factor.

As 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore, never-wed mother to 16-year-old Rory (do the math), Graham is a caffeinated whirlwind of sarcasm and sensibility who obviously loves the hell out of her kid and, by the magic of that television anomaly known as good writing, is relieved of bearing the TV single-mom cross of being always right or always wrong. Apart from an inexhaustible supply of snappy witticisms that puts the collective six-pack of Friends to shame, Lorelai is warm, fallible and downright human. And, yes, a stone fox in a short skirt. Holy smit, is she ever.

2. Everything else. Real-kid Rory (newcomer Alexis Bledel), the lone teen on TV who is neither a jaded know-it-all or an emotional M-80; the setting of Stars Hollow, a not-too-quirky little town that certainly isn't Northern Exposure, no matter what the "other" critics say (that would be NBC's Ed); a supporting cast with nary a weak link, not even the French concierge at Lorelai's inn with the most far-fetched accent this side of a Kids in the Hall sketch; the hilarious one-two punch of Edward Herrman (he's not just the voice of Dodge commercials!) and Kelly Bishop as Lorelai's patrician parents; the aforementioned skirt... well, you get the idea.

After sitting out Thanksgiving night in favor of back-to-back episodes of Charmed, the Girls will return to Thursday kamikaze duty against Friends. In case I haven't made myself clear, a recap: There's nothing new on Friends that you can't see in syndication any hour of the day, Gilmore Girls rules, and Lauren Graham will be mine, oh ye-- I mean, watch the show.

And Michael Mann has gone on to the movies and such successes as "Heat" and "The Insider." Wolf has gone on to Law & Order and a string of failures, including the execrable L&O:SOL. So one does wonder about Wolf's personal abilities.

I waited on Ben's review. I wondered how he would dissect Deadline with his laser-like intellect. I considered how he might deconstruct the show's dialogue. How Ben might finally tear the show into little pieces and then gloat over his bloody handiwork.

Then the word came down: Deadline had flatlined. It was cancelled, to be replaced with reruns of Law & Order until further notice. There was some noise about how the remaining filmed episodes would end up on USA, but in effect, Deadline was dead.

This puts any reviewer in an odd position. You've watched the show, possibly with great suffering, in the interests of journalism and criticism. In a sense, you're duty bound to write your review. But if the show has already been cancelled, what purpose can this serve? If you heap praise upon it, that praise is hollow, for the show is no more and no one can see it. And it's not as if you can expect that a cogent review filled with superlatives will bring that show back. Similarly, if the show was awful and you say so, you run the risk of making beating a dead horse look downright constructive.

Ben seemed to choose a simpler path: Forget Deadline ever existed. Move on to bigger and better pursuits, like analyzing Ralph Nader position papers.

But I could not stand idly by while Deadline slipped beneath the waves of viewer apathy. I felt someone should say a few kind words over the body -- and further, that someone should be me. Because I liked the heck out of Deadline, and I'm going to miss it.

I think the main factor in the demise of Deadline was the marketing of it by NBC. Since Dick Wolf produces the venerable ratings winner Law & Order, and Deadline was also his, NBC figured that they could target L&O viewers and get them to load Deadline onto their viewing schedules. This was a mistake, because approaching Deadline with an L&O mindset was a bad idea. Deadline was less Law & Order: Media Division and more Murder She Wrote: The Early Years. If you came to Deadline looking for strong plotting, exploration of the byzantine structure of the American law enforcement-criminal prosecution axis, or twist courtroom endings, you came to the wrong show. No, Deadline's charms were in many ways entirely different from those of the show NBC decreed was its progenitor.

For one thing, Deadline was funny. Very funny. Law & Order has always had its funny bits -- I'm convinced there's a writer shackled in a dark basement somewhere whose only job is to come up with the witty teaser line, usually uttered by Jerry Orbach, just before the opening titles roll. (Say, about a murder victim impaled on a spike: "Well, I guess he got the point.") But L&O is clearly not a comedy. Not so Deadline, which was very nearly a sitcom in a lot of ways -- and if you weren't laughing at the intentional jokes, well, then you could laugh at the dopey situations, such as when the police left the gossip reporter alone with the murder suspect.

For another thing, Deadline was not a true ensemble show. The whole series turned on the axle of its main character, Wallace Benton, played by Oliver Platt. He was given fantastic support by the rest of the cast -- Hope Davis, Lili Taylor, Bebe Neuwirth, Tom Conti. Every actor on the set seemed to be enjoying themselves, leaping into their parts with relish and abandon; but none so much as Platt, who attacked the role of the drinking, disheveled, acerbic and sometimes bleary Benton with everything he had. His performance was fantastic and offbeat and entertaining in its every molecule. Platt perfectly personified Benton's brash way with people, sweeping into the offices of powerful men and confronting them with their errors. His seemingly woozy way of talking to witnesses belied his conversational skill; in fact, his appearance of drunkeness might have been the verbal equivalent of Jackie Chan's Drunken Boxing fighting style. And yet Benton was often actually drunk, and Platt masterfully managed to convey the difference between when Benton was filled with alcohol and when he was merely pretending to stagger.

Of course, acting is little without good dialogue, and good dialogue was one thing Deadline had in common with L&O. The characterizations were strong and interesting, with a depth rarely found on TV. Their lines were complex and used big words and everything. The actors were permitted to express their intelligence -- both intelligent actors and intelligent dialogue being scarce treats indeed.

Perhaps, though, in addition to the marketing error, the other error that sank Deadline was that, in making the characters engaging and smart, the writers and producers failed to make them entirely likeable. Platt's Benton was a lot of fun to watch, but he was also abrasive, abusive, overbearing, intimidating. Not the kind of traits that make an easy hero. Perhaps American viewers are not in the market for difficult protagonists on TV -- witness the early death of Robert Pastorelli's Cracker, or any of Dabney Coleman's vehicles (from Buffalo Bill on), or Jeremy Piven's Cupid.

Then again, there were Deadline's plots, which were fairly insipid. While it says something that I could enjoy the show despite the unfortunate story arcs, it also says something that I had to enjoy the show "despite." In the last episode aired, the writers had sunk so low as to have the killer confess to Benton, then attempt to kill him, only to -- can you believe this twist ending? -- be shot by the police who were listening on the wiretap Benton was wearing! For the first half hour, this was the most exciting and involving TV show I'd seen in a long time; then it stumbled badly, then threw itself down the stairs, and by the time the killer was confessing it was beating itself with a chair leg and trying to squeeze its head into the storm drain. I can't imagine why this creaky old stupid retread plot, one that wouldn't have fooled TV viewers in 1956, had to exist alongside lines like this one: "I visit my daddy's grave and I pray. You know what I pray to my daddy? I pray for him to give me the strength... to dig up his body and beat his head in with a shovel for leaving me like this."*

Well, it doesn't matter now. Deadline is dead. And maybe I'm the only one, but I will mourn it.

* Note added March 18, 2003: Thanks to the miracle of Deadline repeats of Bravo, I can now bring you this quote precisely: "Every year I go visit his grave and I pray on his grave. You know what I prayed last year?...I said Daddy, God give me the strength to dig you up and beat the crap out of you with this shovel for leaving me the way you did."

Not "great" as in "a great show." No, we all heartily expected FreakyLinks to be absolutely terrible. But we expected it to be great fun to savage, to be the perfect punchline for many a joke, to be a one-word laff generator along the lines of Shasta McNasty.

See? You're laughing already.

Early in the summer FreakyLinks looked like it was going to make for interesting TV. Again, not that the show itself would be interesting, but that the way its life played out would be. The hype machine was just gearing up for the show. Brought to us by the producers of "The Blair Witch Project"! Given that that film was built almost entirely on hype, we had a lot to look forward to.

Things began to get more interesting in mid-September, when a couple of TeeVee staffers in L.A. for the wedding of prolific Vidiot Ben Boychuk found, on the street, a copy of the script for FreakyLinks' fourth episode. Was this just a mistake, or was this some kind of genius guerrilla marketing technique? We didn't know. Leaving scripts around for people to find could be a brilliant stroke of public relations -- or just an accident.

Shortly after that the promise began to collapse. The creators of the show were running away from it as fast as they could and it was clear that Fox wasn't pinning all of its hopes of world domination on it. Our interest in the script began to wane, and six out of eight of us pegged the show to be one of the first casualties of the itchy cancellation fingers of the networks.

We were all wrong -- FreakyLinks ended up being put on hiatus, not cancelled, even though in programmingexecutivespeak "hiatus" means "unplugging the life support to see if Grandma can breathe on her own." The show ended up, not by making a giant splash of awfulness and getting bits of itself all over Rupert Murdoch; rather, it quietly wandered off after the hype faded and it turned out no one had bothered to tune into it.

No one but me, of course. I had tuned in so I could write a review. But before I could get to the keyboard, poof! It was gone. FreakyLinks, we hardly knew ye.

This is sad because, really, FreakyLinks just wasn't that bad a show. I'll readily admit that I have never been a fan of The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or any of those other silly shows which pass for sci-fi these days. Even so, while I could see that FreakyLinks was not up to that level of quality, neither could I see that it was too far below it. Like Buffy or X-Files, FreakyLinks was shot in the style I like to call Late Twentieth Century Murk; like those other shows, it put up cheesy latex masks in place of interesting villains; like those other shows, it relied more on its soap operatic machinations for audience interest than it did on the plot of any individual episode.

FreakyLinks didn't step too far wrong. It only had two problems that I could see. The first was tone: If your material is going to be as silly as this, you have two choices on how to play it. You can play it all in deadly earnest no matter how stupid -- this is the X-Files approach, and the one taken when actors started pretending Gene Roddenberry was William Shakespeare. Or you can play it like Bruce Campbell did in "Army of Darkness" -- make like Tim Curry, camp it up, and dance, baby! FreakyLinks chose the middle way, trying to be both serious and happy-go-lucky at the same time. The humor made it hard to take the rubber tentacles seriously; the fact that people's arms were being ripped off in gruesome detail made it hard to laugh.

The second problem was simple chemistry. Ethan Embry, as the lead, Derek Barnes, had charisma, and was able to project that grungy bed-head charm that made it seem like he had body odor but it didn't matter. Lisa Sheridan, playing Chloe Tanner and obviously there for the will-they-or-won't-they angle (call it the Mulder/Scully Element), is pretty enough and showed plenty of skin just below her navel. But the two of them sometimes seemed to be acting from different soundstages. Meanwhile Lizette Carrion's Lan Williams was beamed in from another city; she was supposed to have a crush on Derek, but there was no clear reason why, and no reason to care, either. And Karim Prince was on set as Jason Tatum, playing essentially the same part he played on Malcolm in the Middle, with the unfortunate problem that, with his six minutes of screen time on Malcolm, he was perfect, but with his much larger role here, his deadpan act turned him into set dressing. Half the time you'd forget he was even there.

Even so, these were not major flaws. The show could have surmounted these. And in terms of writing, there was nothing here that couldn't have been transplanted almost directly into X-Files or Buffy or any of those shows.

Perhaps FreakyLinks was simply a victim of timing; perhaps the era of The X-Files and its brood is simply past. One can but hope. It would nice if someone went out and produced one of the good science fiction shows which I'm sure are lurking out there, waiting for someone to find them. One can only take so many Farscapes and Lexxes and Andromedas -- so many Xenas, Herculeses, Cleopatra 2525s, Earth: Final Conflicts, Star Trek repackagings, Dark Angels and the rest of those murky, digitally-enhanced spools of videotape.

Maybe someone will find some actual science fiction for once. Babylon 5 can't be the only show out there.

Somewhere like, say, the film "Being John Malkovich."

Orson Bean's seemingly dead career, I thought, was coming back to life. Good for him! Then I heard he was going to be on Normal, Ohio with John Goodman. How excellent for ol' Orson!

Then I saw Normal, Ohio.

Expect to see Orson Bean on Match Game Aughty-One next year.

In Normal, Ohio, the beleaguered Bean plays Bill Gamble, father to John Goodman's character, William "Butch" Gamble, and Joely Fisher's Pamela. The elder Gamble is given no funny lines, no interesting characterization -- nothing, in fact, beyond the gag-writer's premise: He doesn't understand how his son turned out to be gay. This allows him to say things about homosexuality in a crusty and addled way and generate many non-laughs.

Not that you'd notice the odd clinker issuing from Orson amidst the rattling and clanking of all the other non-jokes from all the other actors. And the jokes aren't the worst part, either. No one, as they say, gets out alive.

Take Joely Fisher, for example.

Another Orson -- Welles -- once observed that the actual sex act can't be shown in a regular film because it is so arresting, nothing else in the film can compete. The audience's interest in the story, in the characters, in the whole movie as movie, collapses.

And so it is with Joely Fisher's breasts. As soon as they come onscreen -- and they do, oh, how they do -- Normal, Ohio comes to a screeching halt. Actually, though, no, it doesn't, but it might as well, because it is that completely and thoroughly impossible to pay even the vaguest token amount of attention to the dialogue while those fabulous funbags are bouncing around. And bounce they do. And hang out. Fisher spends at least half of her screen time bending over like a Hooters waitress with your seventh mai tai on a tray, only with fewer clothes on.

It's not like these are the most glorious mammaries to grace the small screen. It's just that they're there, and they're not going away, and they're waving at you, and calling your name, and whistling and jumping up and down -- "Look at me! Look at me! Hey, down here! Look at me!"

I can only therefore assume Joely was given the same lousy, telegraphed, obvious, lame, pathetic, laugh-track riddled jokes as the rest of the cast. I couldn't tell for sure. I'm not certain if this qualifies as a blessing or not. I'm guessing it is.

And then, if you look off beyond the boobies, there's John Goodman. Poor John Goodman.

Goodman's character Butch is the center of the show. The idea is that he is gay. Isn't that funny? A gay man who isn't young and in shape and well-dressed? Just a regular good ole boy homosexual?

That's not funny all by itself?

Okay, well, he's not just gay. He has also decided to move back to his small hometown of Normal -- which is pretty funny all by itself, right? -- Ohio, stay with his sister, get back in touch with his son, and learn to deal with being gay in the Midwest. Funny yet?

No?

But it's John Goodman!

And, no, it still isn't funny. And it doesn't get funny. It doesn't even approach funny. It isn't even in the Oort Cloud of funny.

Poor John is trying his manly best to work with the material he's given, which is exactly nothing. As a result, he appears to be reprising his role from Roseanne, only with more gay jokes. This impression isn't helped by the fact that the sets all appear to have been recycled from Goodman's former show. It looks almost as if Dan Conner kicked out his wife, slapped on a paint job and some new furniture, and came out of the closet. It looks like that but it doesn't sound like that, because this show is missing one thing that made Roseanne great: humor.

Oh, how the humor is missing from this show. There isn't even a humor-shaped hole where it ought to be. It's just never been there. At no point anywhere in the development of Normal, Ohio was there even the slightest wisp of amusement.

Dad wants to meet Butch for a drink. Butch suggests a place. They meet there and Dad loves it. "They have two men's rooms!" he chortles. The punchline is: Dad doesn't know it's a gay bar!

Is there, somewhere, a universe in which this is funny? If so, I hope no crazed military scientist ever discovers it, because otherwise we'll be overrun by a race of people who make Peter Jennings look like John Belushi. The ability to smile will be bred out of the human race and we'll all stand around with that "Who farted?" look like we're in an NYPD Blue cast photo. Forever.

What Normal, Ohio needs, really, is a big John Goodman-shaped hole, and a smaller Orson Bean-shaped hole, because neither of them deserve to have this crime against humanity eternally darkening their resumes. Joely Fisher's funbags, however, can remain with the rest of her, preferably someplace where they won't scare -- or hopelessly envelop -- the children.

Maybe Orson and John could get on a game show or two. That wouldn't be so bad.

And now, a look inside the mind of the producers of The Michael Richards Show:

"It's been two years since Seinfeld, so the viewing public is no doubt starved for quality television entertainment. And since we don't have any to give them, we'll just stick Kramer in a suit."

With that out of the way, let's get to the petty sniping. The Michael Richards Show stars Michael Richards as Vic Nardozza, a great detective. Or that's what the show would have us believe, anyway. On the job, he's clearly a complete incompetent, who should be locked up someplace with soft walls and soothing music, but the characters keep saying things like "Vic, you're the best!" It's disconcerting.

That's what probably happens behind the scenes, too. Michael Richards has built a narrow reputation based on the amusing way he used to enter a television apartment, and now he's got people surrounding him, talking up his comic timing and before you know it, there he his falling over couches in prime time again.

Naturally, the writers of The Michael Richards Show weren't satisfied with putting the convulsive twitches of an alleged detective on television screens, so he has comic relief second bananas, too. They're there for when the viewer gets tired of the ponderous issues raised by a detective constantly in danger of strangling on his own tie.

Comic Relief Drone Number One is Tim Meadows, who you may remember from Saturday Night Live. You might also have seen the commercials for his recent movie "The Ladies Man." I'll just go ahead and assume you didn't actually watch the movie. Tim's character, Kevin Blakely, is a voyeur. Get it? He works for a private detective, and he's a voyeur! Isn't it deliciously spicy? It leads to wacky punchlines that mention -- get this -- sex! Wow! Edgy! In your face! Proactive!

Or, as it turns out, not so much. It's a sad thing when a sitcom can't wring laughs out of a premise like that. Or indeed, any premise at all.

The show also features a pair of guys (Brady and Jack) played by William Devane and Bill Cobbs whose main job is to be old and cranky. And then there's Amy Farrington, who's a woman. None of these allegedly comic relief put half the effort into their wackiness that Richards does. It's exhausting to watch him flinging himself at the ground over and over. Exhausting, but not, for some reason, amusing. I never thought I'd pine for the days of Chevy Chase and the brilliantly nuanced way he used to fall down.

In fact, for a show based around a funny-face goofball, the subplots are surprisingly somber. In the pilot, for example, Kevin thought Jack was dying, and then Jack had a stroke. And then heartwarming hilarity ensued when it turned out that Jack had just had his first ice cream headache.

The truth is, like so many other television shows, The Michael Richards Show isn't amazingly terrible. All of the wrong-headed thinking happened before the cameras started rolling. What's on the screen isn't really worth a hyperbolic discourse -- it'll be gone in a month and forgotten in a year. Big deal and good riddance.

I'm sorry. That was mean. The truth is, I hope this show lasts for years with really low ratings. Every three or four shows, the writers could come up with a new "comically" incoherent job for Richards. He's a spastic fireman! He's an epileptic mechanic! He's a congressman with an inner-ear disorder! He's a short-order cook with no control of his bowels! He's an orthopedic surgeon with the hiccups! And so on, until everyone in Hollywood has the whole thing out of their system.

After an evening of carefully viewing, reviewing and analyzing CBS's Wednesday night sitcom Welcome to New York, I believe I can definitively reach one incontrovertible conclusion: the show is most definitely set in New York.

Early on, in the episode I watched, naïve, transplanted Midwesterner Jim Gaffigan wonders if people celebrate birthdays in New York. His arch, testy boss, played by Christine Baranski, talks constantly about what is palatable to sophisticated New Yorkers. And his arch, testy colleague, played by Rocky Carroll, marvels about what a fish out of water Gaffigan is, as the poor, dumb rube tries to adjust to his new life in The City That Never Sleeps.

There's also the title -- Welcome to New York. That was a tip-off for me, too.

The fact that Welcome to New York does, in fact, take place in Gotham is of critical importance to the show's central thesis -- that New Yorkers, while arch and testy, are no match for the give-'em-heck optimism of naïve, transplanted Midwesterners. Imagine how hard that concept would have been to pull off if Welcome to New York were set in, say, Fresno. Or Fort Lauderdale. Or Davenport, Iowa.

Davenport, Iowa would have made no sense.

But producers wisely picked New York as the setting, main character and raison d'être of their show. Why wisely? Because we're three episodes into Welcome to New York's run, and so far, the point of each installment seems to be that New York is unlike any city in the world. New York, New York -- It's a hell of a town. They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway. But if you make it there, you'll make it anywhere.

If we're suddenly dealing with Welcome to Roanoke, that shit doesn't fly.

Take last week's episode, in which Gaffigan -- a TV weatherman from fly-over country who's taken a new job in Manhattan -- celebrates his birthday (Turns out they do celebrate birthdays in New York!). Among the gifts Gaffigan receives is a present from Carroll, the arch, testy anchorman on the Today-like show that employs them both. Carroll gives Gaffigan a toupee, telling him that bald and dowdy is not a look that plays well in a city where you can get Chinese takeout 24 hours a day. The rest of the episode centers around how ridiculous Gaffigan looks, how he's too much of a hayseed to notice and how Baranski has to trick the gullible Midwesterner into ditching the rug, lest appalled New Yorkers change the channel en masse to something not featuring a gangly yokel in a fright wig.

This is pretty pedestrian stuff, neither good nor bad, neither knee-slapping hilarious nor thuddingly unfunny. There's some chuckles to be had here, but nothing you'll recount to friends and co-workers the next morning. Indeed, if you're like me, you'll have trouble recounting even the most minimal details about the show fifteen minutes after it fades from the cerebrum.

Except the bit about it being set in New York.

Your appreciation for the comedic stylings of Welcome to New York will depend largely on your tolerance for Christine Baranski. I can barely stand the sight of her, even with a stiff drink and a damp rag, so you can guess how many return visits I'll be making to the show.

You may remember Baranski as the arch, testy actress who spirited the sitcom Cybill away from the gaping maw of its titular star, Cybill Shepherd. History has repeated itself with Welcome to New York, which originally was developed as a vehicle for Jim Gaffigan. But into the breach stepped Baranski, her face drawn tighter than the Yankee Stadium tarpaulin during a rain delay, to selflessly throw herself in front of all those intrusive cameras.

If only Baranski looked like she was having any fun. Maybe the nips and tucks have left her face incapable of registering emotion, but Baranski spent most of the episode I watched looking like she was awaiting the rescue airlift. And she's not the only one. With the exception of Gaffigan -- who, we must remember, is playing a sunny Midwestern -- the cast of Welcome to New York just comes off as... well... arch and testy. Rocky Carroll is arch and testy. Sara Gilbert, I believe, is the cover girl for the latest issue of Arch & Testy Monthly. Even B.D. Wong -- B.D. Wong! -- comes across as arch and testy and otherwise too cool for school. For anyone who ever saw "Father of the Bride II," the vision of a sedate and understated B.D. Wong is as haunting as the closing strains of "Gotterdammerung."

Welcome to New York is produced by David Letterman's Worldwide Pants outfit, a fact not lost on people desperate to create parallel worlds. Jim Gaffigan is from the Midwest, these people point out. So is David Letterman. Gaffigan plays a weatherman. Letterman used to be a weatherman.

Alas, that's where the happy coincidences end. Letterman, of course, left his weatherman days behind when he high-tailed it out of Indianapolis. He never worked for a Today-like morning show, and, to the best of my knowledge, none of his bosses ever bore an eerie resemblance to Skeletor. I'm guessing his day-to-day dealings with friends and co-workers are not nearly so joyless and prickly as Welcome to New York might suggest.

Oh, and one other big difference -- Letterman left the cozy confines of the Midwest, heading for Los Angeles to seek his fame and fortune. Welcome to New York is, of course, set in New York.

The show is very explicit about that.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I would pay cash money to see Andre Braugher read the telephone book. White pages, yellow pages, those blue pages up in the front with the details on how to reach government offices -- any of it. Even the part about how to disable call waiting.

Braugher, who made his name as Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street, is back on series television this fall with Gideon's Crossing. Like Homicide, Gideon's Crossing is based on a non-fiction book. Like Homicide, it was created by screenwriter Paul Attanasio. And just as Homicide was a different sort of take on a very traditional TV series topic (the cop show), so is Gideon's Crossing a take on the age-old series concept, the hospital drama.

Yet despite those similarities, Gideon's Crossing ain't no Homicide. First, Homicide was a ensemble show, even though there were times when Braugher was clearly on the verge of becoming the show's lead by the sheer force of his screen presence. Gideon's Crossing is completely Braugher's vehicle. Sure, there's a large supporting ensemble of young doctors (plus Ruben Blades in the Hector Elizondo role as one of Dr. Gideon's colleagues), but they seem to be relegated to B stories as a change of pace from the main plot threads commanded by Braugher himself.

This is good news in that Gideon's Crossing is almost an Hour of Braugher -- keep in mind the phone book premise above. Can't get enough of him. Unfortunately, I'd almost rather Gideon's Crossing be a half hour of Andre Braugher than a full hour of Braugher interlaced with a B story with his supporting cast.

As Dr. Gideon, Braugher is as great as I had expected. Gideon's a complicated guy -- a bit of a prickly pear, but a man with a lot of heart. A man who is hard to get to know, but once you get though his barriers, he'll fight for you until his last breath. The concept of the series is that Gideon, who teaches medical students and runs an experimental medicine program at a hospital in Boston, is a man who has submerged himself in his work following the recent death of his wife. And while that sentence makes it sound very much like a paint-by-the-numbers TV series, it doesn't play quite that way. Gideon is not just the grieving doctor burying himself in his work that you've seen on ER, Chicago Hope... you name it. There's more there.

The show covers the weightiest of topics, from how we deal with terminal illness to the screwed up condition of the medical system in America today. And yet it manages to cover them without degenerating into movie-of-the-week-itis, which is no mean feat.

Now the bad news. The Gideon's Crossing supporting cast is, at least after three episodes, a mostly faceless, uninteresting collection of self-absorbed, self-centered, and unrealistic characters. We spend so little time with them that when it comes time to reveal a character trait, it's done in broad strokes. There's a grumpy, arrogant chief resident straight off the Eriq LaSalle production line (Russell Hornsby). The rest of the bunch, whom I honestly can't keep straight after three episodes, are mostly played as slackers and screw-ups. One would assume that over time, if given the chance, they'll all gain some depth. But first impressions are important, and Gideon's Crossing flunks that test: these supporting characters are uninteresting except when they're repellant.

Add to those qualities the fact that, in the pilot episode at least, I couldn't understand them half the time. In later episodes, the dialogue appears to have slowed down a touch -- but several of these actors are still hard to comprehend, even now.

Oh, the dialogue. The first two episodes had reams of it. It's so rare that we get a TV series as literate, as intelligent, as Gideon's Crossing. But I have to admit, after a while I felt like I needed a breather -- there was just so much talking, so much dialogue, that it began to make my head swim. (And yet, for the show's premiere, I didn't even get a commercial break: it was shown commercial free. By the end of that hour, I was full up on dialogue.) The series' third episode (written by another Homicide veteran) was much less talky, which lets me hold out some hope that Gideon's Crossing isn't going to be a weekly anaesthetic.

In the end, I'm pretty ambivalent about Gideon's Crossing, when I had hoped to be blown away. Saddled by an uninteresting supporting cast, I get the feeling that I'm watching an expensive show and a chintzy show that have been welded together. Braugher makes me want to keep watching, and yet each time I begin to watch, I am reminded why I feel underwhelmed. It just doesn't feel right. Something's not there.

Maybe if those young medical residents were replaced by copies of the Yellow Pages...

The four major actors in Freedom are named Holt, Scarlett, Bodhi, and Darius. Their characters are named Owen, Becca, Londo, and James. Now, aside from the reassuring presence of "Londo Pearl," those are the worst dystopian-future names I've ever heard. One of the things that lifts science fiction above the lesser dramatic arts is that it has characters with silly names. Names like "Buckaroo Banzai," "Spock," "Valentine Michael Smith," "Obi-Wan Kenobi," "R. Daneel Olivaw," and "Gilligan." But in the topsy-turvy world of UPN, the character names aren't anywhere near as silly as the actors.

Even "Londo Pearl" isn't as silly as the actor's real name of "Bodhi Elfman." Not that that's going to keep me from saying "Londo Pearl" as often as possible. Londo Pearl Londo Pearl Londo Pearl.

Even though one of the characters is a goofball (and it's Londo Pearl!), all four are superefficient fighting machines, trained in all sorts of unpronounceable punching and kicking and so on like that. Freedom speaks to the anti-authority kung fu-fighting soldier within us all. If it happens that you don't think you have one of those inside you, maybe it would be best to skip it.

The premise is that some sort of national calamity has stricken the United States, and the military (the evil, evil military!) has taken over the country, incidentally imprisoning our heroes, who escape and start performing terroristic actions for "the Resistance."

The opening crawl (of course it's in front of a flag, and of course there are dramatic snare drum rat-tat-tats) ends with: "But it was peace without freedom. And that was a price some of us would not pay." This tone of overblown rhetoric isn't maintained very well throughout the show itself, which is more concerned with macho chatter and fight sequences. Fight "sequences" are more elaborate than the mere "fights" you get in most shows. The fights in Freedom were billed as being "Matrix-inspired," which I was hoping would mean "lots of useless slow motion" like in Secret Agent Man. Unfortunately for me, the fights are actually "Gymkata-inspired," which means there are occasional random cartwheels. And if there's a highbar handy, you can count on someone to do a few giant spins on it.

I liked the action sequences anyway, because every punch, kick, and round-off back handspring has a whooshing sound effect. And they're all the same whooshing sound effect, too. It's a shame that Foley artists haven't advanced their craft more since they were crudely dubbing 1970s Kung Fu movies.

Before they're allowed to break out of the maximum-security military prison, our heroes (who could really use a catchy group name) are forced to fight in a big pit. Normally when two prisoners are forced to fight for the entertainment of the guards (like in every gladiator movie ever, and also in Tron, if you're interested), they make a big show of not wanting to. "Don't make us fight!" they cry. Here, when Decker and Barrett fight each other in a big pit surrounded by screaming inmates (like in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome"), they seem positively cheerful about it. And why shouldn't they be? There's nothing wrong with two burly fellas showing off their fancy shirtless martial arts moves, is there? Anyway, they know that they're the heroes, so it's not like they'll accidentally kill each other or anything. And indeed, after a lot of sparring, they shake hands and bask in their shared manliness.

That's all it takes for the main characters in Freedom to become the best of friends, too. Minutes after meeting, they're working like a team. Like a team that's somehow... familiar.

Let's see. There's a guy in charge (Capt. Owen Decker), a crazy guy (Londo Pearl), an angry black guy who likes to be called by an initial (James "J." Barrett), and a female guy (Becca Shaw). In The A-Team, there was a guy in charge (John "Hannibal" Smith), a crazy guy (H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock), an angry black guy liked to be called by two initials (B.A. Baracus), and a pretty-boy guy (Templeton "Face-Man" Peck). All I'm saying is that I don't think the parallels are entirely coincidental. And that The A-Team was more fun.

Oh, and did I mention that one of the characters is a master of the art of snapping coins so hard they break spines? Would you like to know which character that is?

Londo Pearl.