November 2001 Archives

One on One is a new fall series about an African-American man who enjoys living the good life, but unexpectedly finds himself taking care of his daughter when she moves into his swinging Baltimore bachelor pad -- a development that puts a decided crimp in our hero's style. The show is every bit as tedious as it is forgettable.

The Bernie Mac Show is a new fall series about an African-American man who enjoys living the good life, but unexpectedly finds himself and his wife taking care of his nephew and two nieces when they move into his spacious pad in the Hollywood hills -- a development that puts a decided crimp in our hero's style. Bernie Mac also happens to be funny, engaging and one of the better shows to debut this year.

Two similar set-ups, two very different results. So what is it that makes The Bernie Mac Show entertaining and One on One excruciating? How does Bernie Mac freshen up a premise that One on One makes as interesting as last night's dishwater? What makes one show a laugh-fest and the other one laughable?

Here's a hint -- it's not because The Bernie Mac Show is about a married guy instead of a single guy.

No, what sets apart The Bernie Mac Show from One on One -- or Bob Patterson or Inside Schwartz or any of the other lame sitcoms that spring up on the networks' prime time lineups like fuzz on weeks-old meatloaf -- is a distinctive perspective, a unique point of view. Good comedies have one. Bad ones don't. Spotting a bad sitcom is easy enough, and not just because it appears on NBC on Thursday nights at 8:30 or stars Tony Danza. Rather, a show sinks into the mire when it trots out the same stories, caricatures and punchlines that have been the hallmark of bad sitcoms since Jed Clampett's kinfolk told him to move away from thar'.

In other words, bad shows distinguish themselves by failing to distinguish themselves. I'm willing to wager a significant sum of cash that you could take an episode of some tepid, half-hearted effort like, say, Yes Dear, switch around the character names, add a wacky neighbor or two and, without missing a beat, have a perfectly usable script for Raising Dad or Reba or any one of the other dozen bland family sitcoms currently menacing the country.

(And the chilling thing is, some network executive might stumble across this paragraph, exclaim, "My God, think of the money we could save!" and haul ass back to the office to start blue-penciling old Mama's Family scripts.)

That's not to say that good sitcoms necessarily reinvent the wheel when it comes to plotlines -- they don't -- but they at least do a good job of giving the wheel nice tires. A sitcom stands out from the crowd not necessarily by concocting stories you've never seen before but by taking the conceits you've watched a dozen different times and putting its own unique imprint on the procedings. In even the most predictable of situations, a Ray Barone is going to react differently than a Frasier Crane or a Malcolm... well, whatever his last name is.

Or a Bernie Mac, for that matter. A recent episode of the show centered on how kids are -- in Bernie Mac's words -- "nasty, disease-carrying midgets" and the efforts of our hero to avoid getting infected with the death flu. Now, that's a plotline that's probably been on at least one network show each fall dating back to the Coolidge administration. But it's a safe bet that no other show every gave that well-worn idea the Bernie Mac Show treatment -- a montage showing how the virus leapt from child to child, complete with freeze frames and captions and musical accompanyment from The Ohio Players' "Rollercoaster."

That's clever. That's original. That's something Bernie Mac -- both the show and the performer -- do very well.

Which is not to say that The Bernie Mac Show isn't without its flaws. After all, this _is_ a program that features children -- three of them as a matter of fact, which is about three more than allowed under my comprehensive "Children should be seen and not heard and not much of either when it comes to network TV" policy. But if, like me, your only use for the young'uns is to flavor your mixed drinks with their salty tears, you can at least take comfort in the fact that Bernie Mac apparently feels much the same way.

"I'm going to beat your head until the white meat shows!" he says to one of the moppets in the premiere episode -- another sign that The Bernie Mac Show isn't afraid to speak with its own, distinctive voice. I mean, can you imagine Bob Saget saying something like that to one of the Olsen twins?

Not that it wouldn't be cool...

It's funny -- three of the four best new half-hour comedies to debut this fall are on Fox (The fourth, Scrubs, in on NBC, and I can only assume it landed on the schedule there on a day when the guys who normally call the shots at the Peacock Network were out sick.), and they're about as different as night and day. The Tick is about a thick-headed superhero. Undeclared is about a motley assortment of undergraduates. The Bernie Mac Show is about a guy -- conveniently named Bernie Mac -- raising three kids. Nothing in common, really, save for a willingness to tell a story with their own individual flair.

One on One, on the other hand, matches Bernie Mac plot point by plot point. And yet the differences between the two shows couldn't be more stark.

If you had the misfortune to see the Saturday Night Live episode that was hosted by Joe Montana and Walter Payton, you already know how good athletes are at comedy. The correct answer, for those of you who haven't seen it, is "not very good at all." Now replace Montana and Payton, who are considered fairly articulate in the world of professional athletics, with the likes of Judge Mills Lane, and you've put your finger on the basic problem with Inside Schwartz.

Adam Schwartz, played by Breckin Meyer, is supposedly an aspiring sportscaster, although he really works for his father's meat company. Or possibly sandwich company. I wasn't sure. The important thing is that his father is played by Richard Kline, who played Larry, the archetypal Wacky Neighbor on Three's Company. And he's the funniest thing on this show. Someone who used to regularly get out-funnied by Joyce DeWitt and Norman Fell is this show's one shining comic star. I guess all that talk about the decline of culture is true.

The "action" is interrupted by two sportscasters, Kevin Frazier and Van Earl Wright, the hosts of an imaginary sports show called Inside Schwartz. See, like "Inside Sports". Because "Schwartz" rhymes with "Sports". It's bad enough that he's named "Adam" for a feeble one-time joke, but they had to make his last name a joke, too? Er, sorry. Got distracted. My point is that these are real sportscasters, who can be seen in a very slightly more professional context on the National Sports Report. I would cast aspersions on their journalistic integrity, but I note that at least one of them has already appeared several times on Arli$$. And not only that, he seems to be proud of it.

Let's ignore the random sports figures for the moment. Inside Schwartz appears to basically be about Breckin trying to get back together with his ex-girlfriend Eve. Get it? Adam and Eve? Whoo. I realize that you're now crying with laughter, so I'll try to write so it'll make sense through your tear-filled eyes. Wait, that won't work; this show won't make sense no matter what you have in your eyes.

Whenever Breckin's life as a single guy starts to get dull (which is every second he's on the screen), that's when the sports figures get trotted out. One of the basic problems here is that Bill Buckner is only funny as a reference, not as an actual human being. Also, nobody knows what he looks like (which probably saves him a fortune in cleaning cow blood off his car), so Breckin is obliged to say something to the effect of "My golly! It's Bill Buckner! Whose fielding error is widely blamed for the Red Sox World Series loss in 1986! Although Calvin Schiraldi is not without fault!"

My fanciful dialogue no doubt sounds stilted and unlikely. But no more so than the real dialogue as read by Breckin Meyer. I can only assume that the producers wanted to make sure that they didn't overshadow the likes of Dick Butkus. Unfortunately, they did the job too well, so that when the occasional athlete who actually has charisma (like, for example, Magic Johnson), Breckin might as well not even be on screen. Which I'm not saying would be a bad thing.

Breckin (which is a fun name to type) is supported by some people other than Richard Kline. Their purpose is basically to stand around and get told about the plot. His friend Julie, for example, rarely even has a subplot to her name. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that she's there to look wistfully at him and wish that just once, he'd look her way. There's also a married couple who have plot-convenience parties to introduce Breckin to unlikely people. Instead of having a clever pair of names like "Adam and Eve" (personally, I would have named them "Noah and, um, Noah's wife"), they're named David and Emily.

David and Emily seem to think the show is about them; David's dialogue is pretty much all one-liners, while Emily keeps up the pretense that she's a driven career lady. But because it's all about Breckin, I'm not even sure what her career is. I know it has something to do with striding up and down while yelling into one of those cellular-phone-headset things. No, wait. I remember now: the joke with her is that she doesn't hold a job anymore (because they have one of those imaginary television children that never appears on screen), but she still strides up and down and is still, well, driven. Also, it might be twins instead of just one baby. I admit freely that I may not have been paying as much attention as I might have. But come on, this show premiered two months ago; if you were going to watch it, you would have already, wouldn't you?

Oh, one more thing. Breckin has a pet bird. Named "Larry Bird". Get it? Get it? Huh?

There's really no right way to review Enterprise, the latest in what's becoming a long line of "Star Trek" TV series. "Star Trek" partisans will form two solid camps: the first will brook no criticism of anything even remotely related to the great Gene Roddenberry's creation; the second will proclaim, in Comic Book Guy fashion, that it's the Worst Series Ever, and then proceed to fill up their TiVos with every single episode.

The rest of the world will see Enterprise for what it is -- a slickly produced, well-cast sci-fi adventure series that drops enough of the "Star Trek" trappings to make it much more friendly, accessible, and altogether less embarrassing to watch than previous "Trek" series.

Make no mistake about it: Enterprise's producers are on a mission to change just enough about "Star Trek" to make this series appeal to more than the Vulcan-ears-and-Klingon-foreheads contingent. For starters, the words "Star Trek" appear nowhere in the title. The opening titles feature a montage of exploration including present-day NASA spacefrafts, backed by a cheesy (yet inspirational and appropriate) Diane Warren-penned power ballad.

The show's setting also lends a hand at wiping the slate of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager clean: it's a pre-Captain Kirk universe that resembles the present day more than it resembles the typical "Star Trek" far future in which there's no money, no human frailty, and no need to wear any clothing except pajamas.

It also helps that Enterprise's lead -- Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer -- is a well-known actor who's appeared both in a successful sci-fi series with mainstream appeal (Quantum Leap) and in mainstream sitcoms and movies (Murphy Brown, for example). A clever bit of casting, that. And it pays off: with Bakula at the center of Enterprise, the show feels palpably different from all the "Trek" series that came before it. He's clearly confident and in charge, both as the captain of the ship and as the star of a network TV series. In addition to his instant legitimacy in the role, his confidence allows him to share the spotlight with his cast of supporting characters. Sure, there are a few too many of them, and some are still pretty generic (without the accents, I don't think I could tell the weapons officer and the chief engineer apart). But it's a good cast with lots of potential, and Bakula has the weight to bring it out in them.

The whole package of non-Trekness is good news for UPN's aspirations of a broader reach... and you'd think it would be bad news for all the hard-core "Trek" fans out there. But the series' near-future setting does allow for some clever tips of the cap to "Trek" lore that will undoubtedly please the faithful.

However, the series' biggest liability is the fact that it's not really a first-year show, at least not in the same way that most shows are. There's an unbroken line of succession in "Trek" production teams that can take you back all the way to the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. That means that Enterprise can be seen just as much as a series that's wheezing into its fifteenth season than as a newborn babe.

But with the new cast and new setting comes an apparent attempt to change the kind of stories Enterprise tells. The producers have slashed the amount of nonsensical techno-speak and the deus ex machina of our characters inventing previously undiscovered scientific solutions to problems appears to have receded for now. That's good news for those of us who began to sour on "Star Trek" the twelfth time Geordi invented a new shield technology that would revolutionize starships forever in less time than it would take MacGyver to bend his first paper clip.

Sometimes it works, and Enterprise feels like it's going to be just what UPN hopes it is: a new, fun adventure series that can be enjoyed by "Trek" fan and non-"Trek" fan alike. Other times, it fails and you get a clunker of an episode that's just one step away from "Battlestar Galactica." But at least series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are trying something different, and risking the occasional failure in order to re-invent a tired, dying "Trek" franchise.

Whether they'll succeed or not is still open to question. But Enterprise gives "Star Trek" its best chance of being relevant in almost ten years.

There was a time when I used to know one or two things. Not earth-shattering things, not the sort of stuff that greases the wheels for your Mensa application or gets universities to name lecture halls after your. But things -- little tidbits of data, a lot of trivia, one or two examples of practical knowledge or logical deduction. Just enough to go to parties and receptions and church socials and give the impression I've read a book or two.

I can name every World Series winner since 1946, for instance. And if you spot me a mulligan or two, I can probably go all the way back to 1903. I can draw the contiguous United States from memory. I can chat in a somewhat informed manner about recent advances in biotech. I know how to cook a duck.

Or, at least, I used to know all of that. Then I made the mistake of tuning in to watch Pasadena one evening. And all of those things I thought I knew -- everything I accepted as a known quantity, as an unassailable fact -- have scattered to the four corners of the earth. The World Series winners since when? The contiguous United what? Bio-who? You want me to do what with that duck?

Who are you? Why are you talking to me? My God -- where are my pants?

I'm a relatively educated man -- dumber than some, smarter than others -- but watching an hour of Pasadena proved to be beyond the scope of my cognitive powers. What happened on the episode I watched? Beats me. Any memorable lines or plot twists? All signs point to no. And just what is Pasadena about, anyway? About 60 minutes long, when you include the commercials.

But that's not what you were asking, was it?

Actually, Pasadena is about rich, powerful people who run a newspaper -- and as a fellow who's spent the last seven years of his professional life in the newspaper business, I can point out two adjectives that are wrong with that sentence. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald before it, Pasadena posits that the rich are different from you and me. Which is true, if you and I are willing to accept the premise that the rich are staggeringly dull.

From what I can gather from frantic phone calls to colleagues, fruitless Internet searches, and my startlingly illegible notes, Pasadena focuses on the Greeley family of the eponymous Southern California municipality. Old Man Greeley runs the newspaper, which he's about to turn over to his son-in-law instead of his wastrel son. Instead of forcing the son to count the cost of his profligate ways, the old man's slight only encourages him to add scheming and conniving to his to-do list, right after whore-mongering. There's another son who's a pill-popping, powder-sniffing goober and a daughter who's a no-talent artist of some sort. Meanwhile, the newspaper-inheriting son-in-law has been stepping out on his wife, played by Dana Delany -- no doubt hard at work on "My Baffling Career Decisions, Volume Two: The Post-'Tombstone' Years." Dana and her adulterous spouse have two teen-aged children -- a son, who's something of a load, and a daughter, who spends most of her time hanging out her eight-kinds-of-horny Lolita-esque classmate. The rest of time, the daughter hangs out with a mysterious mope of a kid named Henry who's come to Pasadena looking for his mother, who may or may not have some sort of connection to the Dana Delany character.

Got all that? You're one up on me then.

If Pasadena sounds like one of those rich-people-are-so-naughty prime-time soaps in the Dynasty or Dallas vein, give yourself only half-credit. Those shows were fun to watch, in a guilty pleasure sort of way. There's no pleasure in Pasadena, and not much in the way of guilt, either. It's just a forced march of tedium.

And that's simply baffling since Pasadena is created by Mike White, who wrote a very good movie called "Chuck and Buck" as well as a couple of Freaks and Geeks episodes. In the coverage leading up to Pasadena's premiere, White talked about sitting the prime-time soap genre on its ear by making his show creepy and dark and edgy.

Well, I'm on edge after watching Pasadena. But I don't think that's what the creative team had in mind.

Maybe we live in an era in which it's hard to shock anybody anymore. Maybe, when the best shows on TV in recent years have included domesticated mobsters and vampire-slaying coeds, one man's edgy is another man's Full House. Or maybe I'm just a dimwitted square. But Pasadena feels about as creepy and dark to me as "Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas" and that latter show at least combines muppets with holiday fun for the entire family.

Part of the problem, of course, is that I caught up with Pasadena three episodes into its run on Fox, instead of watching it steadfastly from the very first shot. Anytime you come in on a show mid-plot arc, there's bound to be some confusion, especially when there's 124 characters and two-thirds of them are named Greeley. But other shows -- Twin Peaks, say, or even X-Files -- have faced the same sort of constraints, and they didn't have much trouble attracting viewers who missed the debut episodes. The reason? They offered interesting characters, compelling stories and a coherent narrative -- Pasadena is 0-for-3 in that regard.

So if you've watched Pasadena from the get-go, you certainly don't need me to tell you whether the show is worth your while or not. Unless the endorsement of total strangers is important to you, you're capable of deciding if the show is worth a weekly hour of your time on your own. And if you haven't caught a minute of Pasadena yet, it doesn't make much sense to start now. It'll only make your head hurt.

While I can't make a recommendation one way or the other in regard to Pasadena, I feel like I won't be doing my job properly if I don't offer some sort definitive opinion, even if it's only about a tangentially related topic. So I'd like to spend the remainder of this review talking about my favorite restaurants in the greater Pasadena area.

In Old Town Pasadena, there's a cafe whose name escapes me at the moment that offers some of the finest Middle Eastern cuisine I've ever enjoyed. I went there once on a date with a lady who described herself as "90 percent vegetarian." I recommend the lamb because a) it's delicious and b) it gets a cheap rise out of your 90-percent vegetarian date when you explain that you find cute animals "particularly tasty."

The Steak 'N Stein is just up the 210 Freeway in Altadena (Memo to Fox: How's about a prime-time soap about crazy, scheming middle class people called "Altadena?" You've got my number). The Steak 'N Stein serves a mean prime rib and a baked potato the size of your head. The waitresses also dress like the St. Pauli Girl, which adds more to the dining experience than you might imagine.

Finally, there's Damon's, which is a long par-five away from Pasadena in Glendale. Damon's sports a South Pacific decor, a clientele comprised almost entirely of Korean War veterans and the best mai tais you will ever be privileged to imbibe.

You'll need about four of them if you plan on making it through an episode of Pasadena with your five wits intact.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, you are officially on the clock.

In the sad realm of fall television reviews, watching a review of a show turn into an obituary is one of the saddest sights of all. So it is with this, TeeVee's one and only visit with the show known as Bob Patterson. To steal from Shakespeare, I come to bury Bob Patterson, and most definitely not to praise him.

If you haven't seen Bob Patterson, well, now you'll never get the chance. But let me tell you the tale, so that when you're musing around the water cooler about the abject failure of Seinfeld co-stars to make it on their own, you'll have some ammunition about Jason Alexander's foray into the world of ABC sitcoms.

Featuring the erstwhile George Costanza as the title character, Bob Patterson is -- sorry, was -- the story of a successful motivational speaker who actually struggles with terrible personality and self-esteem problems.

It's not a bad idea for a show, and Jason Alexander's an appropriate person to take a crack at the part. After all, Bob Patterson is only about five steps to the left of George Costanza: more successful, a little more likeable, but still essentially the same sad-sack guy.

At work, Bob's got to deal with the scene-chewing Robert Klein as Landau, his business partner and a character that's about three steps to the right of Rip Torn's Arthur on The Larry Sanders Show. And then there's his bizarre, wheelchair-bound assistant, Claudia (Chandra Wilson), and his dim-bulb intern Vic (Phil Buckman).

But before I bury Bob Patterson, I will damn him with faint praise. The fact is, the show was mildly funny. (Too bad the show's been cancelled -- given ABC's attempt to bolster Bob Patterson's ratings by rolling out Jerry Seinfeld to mock his former co-star in a series of promos, I would otherwise expect to see "Mildly funny!" in a Bob Patterson ad next week.)

The episode I caught made me laugh out loud a handful of times, thanks more to Claudia and Landau than Bob. And -- honesty time again -- I laughed several times at the comedy stylings of guest star John Tesh. Okay, it was more laughing at Tesh than with him, but it was still laughter.

Still, don't let this confuse you into thinking Bob Patterson was a good show. It was mildly funny, yes, but also remarkably shoddy in its construction. The dialogue seems slack, the way it was shot and edited felt somehow amateurish, and a lot of the acting was painfully stilted. It felt more like a college broadcasting seminar final project than a fully-realized network sitcom. But then, that's what a network sitcom star vehicle will get you: a show that otherwise wouldn't eve see the light of day.

So goodbye, Bob. We were hoping you'd be better, given how great Jason Alexander was on Seinfeld. But our wishing didn't help Michael Richards, and it didn't help you. Now all we're left with are sweet memories of George Costanza... and Jason Alexander's outrageously annoying KFC commercials.

Julia-Louis Dreyfus' new series is due in the spring. Let the countdown begin.

Smallville, the WB's contribution to a sprawling Superman legacy, is a surprisingly good show. Centering on the awkward years when the Man of Steel is merely an Adolescent of Aluminum, the series follows Clark Kent through high school, a humbling experience even for invincible über-aliens.

The show breaks with Superman tradition by presenting Kent as a modern teenager, one yet to don the blue and red Underoos. Accompanied by a meteor shower that nearly leveled Smallville, Kansas, toddler Clark plummeted to Earth in 1989, where he was found by loving parents Johnathan and Martha Kent. Twelve years later, he's struggling with freshman year and wondering if all the other kids are dealing with voice changes, new body hair and total invulnerability.

Come to think of it, just how does Superman trudge through the gloomy moors of adolescence? If he gets a zit, does he need Sulfuric Acid Stridex? A normal teenage boy is already a dangerously clumsy oaf... so what happens when that teenager is running Mach 2 or bench-pressing a Chevy Suburban? And just how does Superman shave? Industrial sander? Diamonds? Chain saw?

Hopefully, these questions will be answered as the show moves along. For now, Clark Kent is still learning the ins and outs of being a superhero. His father refuses to allow the budding gridiron superstar a chance at the football team because the kid would decimate opposing teams. It isn't until late in the show's pilot episode that Clark learns his birth certificate reads "Krypton General Hospital," and he doesn't realize what kryptonite does to him until the show's second episode. While plenty of high schoolers say they wish they were never born, Superteen actually has a good reason: the meteor shower that birthed him is also responsible for turning a large part of Smallville into hideous freaks.

These freaks are the assorted not-so-supervillains that Clark must defeat each week, but through the first couple of episodes these guys are merely secondary to the teenage angst plots. And there's more than enough angst to go around. If there were a drinking game that required a shot for each time Kent whines "Why can't I be normal," you'd be three sheets to the wind by 9:30.

In addition to growing up as a demi-god, Clark's got other serious problems. First of all, he's in love with homecoming queen Lana Lang, girlfriend of the star quarterback. In typical shy loner fashion, Clark turns into Jell-o whenever Lana's around, but at least he's got an excuse: she wears a kryptonite necklace. Our hero even manages to get beaten up by Lana's boyfriend, thanks to that very same necklace.

Obviously, Superman isn't Superman if he's getting pummeled by pretty boys. Hell, he needs a telescope just to spy on Lana's house, only a mile up the road. At this stage of his life, Clark is faster than a speeding bullet, but not quite as powerful as a locomotive. A Buick perhaps, but not a locomotive. There is probably a spirited debate over Buffy vs. Smallville Superman already burning through this country's most pocket-protected chat rooms. In addition, Executive Producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have decreed "No flights and no tights." However, the schoolboy hero does wake up one morning to find himself floating a few feet over his bed and there was a clever blink-and-you'll-miss-it homage to his future cape in the pilot.

The Buffy vs. Clark debate isn't all that far-fetched because at this point, Smallville is shaping up to be a testosterone-flavored Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hey, if you're going to ape a show, you might as well ape the best. Still, anyone who's seen more than a couple Buffys will have a palpable sense of deja vu. There's a teenaged superhero who longs to be normal, living in a town that's a favorite with monsters and assorted hangers-on. Smallville even has its own Scooby Gang. The WB didn't really lose Buffy last year -- it just gave the show a sex change.

But Smallville also manage to copy some of Buffy's behind-the-scenes machinery along with it's plot and characters. The result is a show that is sharply paced, well-written and a pleasure to look at with an artistry in everything from lighting to shot composition. The special effects aren't bad either. The pilot opened with the meteor shower that brings Clark to Earth, and while it won't make anyone forget the space rocks leveling New York and Paris in the movie "Armageddon," the scene was a stunner by TV standards. The dialogue has yet to crackle like a certain Slayer's, but it's never boring and ends up earnest without being overly sappy. Most importantly, the Smallville writers have so far managed to do what other teen show scribes never could: make beautiful people complaining about their lives interesting rather than annoying.

The lead beautiful person is Tom Welling. Apparently Superman ages faster than normal humans, because Welling looks like the oldest freshman Kansas has ever seen, so ancient he makes the 90210 crowd like the cast of Romper Room. Nonetheless, Welling is nearly perfect for the role and pulls off a blend of intensity and sincerity that seems about right for a up and coming hero. He's even physically adept enough to make it through the action scenes without embarrassing himself. And of course Welling has that one ingredient the WB requires of all male leads: it's easy to see him fronting a boy band.

One of the most interesting angles to Smallville is the presence of Lex Luthor, played by a bald Michael Rosenbaum. Luthor, the son of a billionaire industrialist, has moved back to the town and befriends Clark after the Boy of Steel rescues him from a car wreck. Luthor's journey from super friend to mortal enemy should almost be reason enough to keep tuning in.

Almost enough reason. The problem with Smallville is that, despite a decent number of bug-boy squishings, it is still a chick show on a chick network. As well-written as it has been so far, there is no doubt the show aspires to be Superman's Creek rather than Superman, Texas Ranger. But there's only so much super-navel gazing some of us can take before we grab the remote in search of even more bug-boy squishings. Once November 6 rolls around, we'll find them in the same time slot on Fox's 24.

So should you watch Smallville? Here's a little test. At the end of the second episode Clark returns Lana's necklace to her even though he knows it makes him as weak and pathetic as a Berkeley city council member. If you think the gesture was a beautiful, caring expression of unrequited love, than by all means, watch Smallville. But if you roll your eyes and shake your head at the overwhelming tactical stupidity of it all, then it may actually be Kiefer Sutherland who is your one true superhero this fall.