October 2003 Archives

As the world grinds along its yearly course, there are a few things that remain utterly certain in this increasingly chaotic universe -- action and reaction so rote and well-worn that those looking for security can take comfort in them as if they were required by the physical laws that make day follow night.

Children will grow, flowers will bloom and bowel-crampingly shameful hit television series will have sequels.

Fox, in an apparent bid to claim Signs of the Apocalypse I through IV for itself, has started airing the inevitable follow-up to last year's most-watched reality program, Joe Millionaire. After test-driving various titles -- The Anna Nicole Show: The Next Generation, Podunk Jim and the Shrieking Harpies, and Lowering the Bar: Let's Roll Around in Our Own Filth, the programming geniuses down G'day way decided to go with The Next Joe Millionaire.

Only they had a problem: the first Joe Millionaire was last year's most-watched reality program. It's tough to find folks to humiliate when several million people watched you do it to the last batch that was unfortunate enough to stumble into the studio. And so Fox went where all American companies go when they want to find people that they haven't already alienated: the other side of the world.

This is may seem counter-intuitive -- Europe hasn't been all that enthusiastic lately when America says, No, trust us, this will be great -- but if you're looking for people who have little or no idea what passes of culture in the U.S., the Continent (which seems to think it has a culture of its own) is the place to be.

But Rupert Murdoch is nothing if not evil -- that's Fox's new slogan, by the way: "Nothing If Not Evil" -- and so the new batch of shrewish golddiggers had to swear out affidavits and take lie detector tests, stating for the record that they had no idea what they were getting into. One suspects the current Mrs. Murdoch feels roughly the same way. But a shot at a pretend eighty million dollars is a shot at a pretend eighty million dollars, and right now on Fox, you can watch Cowboy Joe -- he's got a song on the Fox Web site; no, really -- thin his heard of Eurobabes before delivering what will be another crushing blow to trans-Atlantic relations come sweeps. Europe will no doubt react with the same good-natured chuckle that followed the firebombing of Dresden.

But what if The Next Joe Millionaire is also a hit? With the Northern Hemisphere pretty much drained of dupes, the network is going to have to find women from the parts of the globe that have long avoided the touch of technology, cynicism and Fox: some place pristine and beautiful, in other words.

But with greater spatial distances comes greater cultural differences, leaving the first episode of Yet Another Joe Millionaire Still -- You People Really Do Lap Up the Crap, Don't You? inevitably going something like this:

I understand he has many, many head of cattle! It would be exciting to be married to a man would could slaughter meat every harvest moon. I long for a day when my teeth refuse to fall out.

Silly, backwards woman! Cattle! In my country, we use a symbolic representation for wealth, making trade convenient and barter a thing of the past. I understand he has many giant stone disks!

What's a cattle?

Are you sure he is wealthy? He's awfully thin for someone who claims great wealth. And his muscles look grotesque and well-defined, like a farm hand.

In the publicity graven image that the Great Fox provided to the elders of my village, he could not even afford a shirt.

It is not "Great Fox," merely "Fox." It is the name of the network. It is, however, "Great Murdoch."

What's a network?

It is a cabal of warlocks, practitioners of the darkest magicks. I have heard they eat the minds of their victims!

Bah. Superstition. They merely cause the mind to sleep forever.

These details do not interest me. I want to know of this man's supposed wealth. If he can support it, I look forward to a dysentery vaccination.

Ah, so that is your secret to staying so thin! I am envious, as I only have intestinal parasites.

You waste your envy, good lady friend. The distended stomach look is out this year.

Hush, you gibbering monkeys! We are here to talk of this man and his fortune. The Great Murdoch bade it so, and his all-seeing eye is upon us even now.

[Sotto voce] Bitch.

I know not what motivates you women, but I am drawn to a man by feelings that transcend petty material matters. It is love that I seek, not gold. Rich or poor, we must be spiritual partners, bound by things greater than what we can touch.

You are full of gazelle excrement.

I am confused. Why does he not just take us all as his wives? Why not have sexual congress with all of us and then banish the ones that do not please him?

Which is, I'm pretty sure, just what Fox is planning.

CBS has got to be feeling pretty damned smug about itself these days. And why not? After all, it wasn't so long ago that the eye network was getting its ass kicked up and down the dial by the other major networks. NBC had Friends and ER. ABC had twenty-four hours of Regis. All CBS had was a sizeable lead in a demographic consisting of Alzheimer's sufferers, octogenarians too feeble to change the channel, and the corpses of nice old widowers found two-weeks dead in their recliners when the neighbors complained about the smell.

Then, in the space of three short seasons, CBS went from perennial monologue-filler for Letterman to a ratings powerhouse. What could have happened to effect such a turnabout? Some mysterious alignment of the fates? A sudden and inexplicable surge of interest in The District? Perhaps an unholy union between Les Moonves and some raven-haired she-devil?

None of the above, actually, but what did happen was every bit as improbable: CBS found itself a goose that lays golden eggs; specifically, a tousle-haired, bestubbled goose named Jerry Bruckheimer. In the last three years, Bruckheimer has produced an impressive string of successes, from CSI to The Amazing Race to the 2002 double whammy of the excellent Without a Trace and the miserably shitty but still insanely popular CSI: Miami. And never mind that no fewer than three of those are basically the exact same show, all of them have been unqualified hits, almost single-handedly pulling CBS out of the Nielsen gutter.

Meanwhile, NBC is a shambles of its former glory. Friends is finally tottering its ancient ass off into the sunset this year, hoping not to shatter a hip on its way, while top-rated drama ER is so old and decrepit that any day now its cadaver will be found rotting in its Barcalounger while the sounds of JAG burble merrily from the TV at its feet. As for ABC... well, it's best not to speak ill of the dead. Suffice it to say that, were it not for Monday Night Football and the untimely passing of a certain beloved sitcom star, you could read the weekly Nielsen Top 20s and remain blissfully unaware that ABC even exists.

So CBS is riding high, and they have their golden egg-laying goose to thank for it. No surprise, then, that CBS commissioned Bruckheimer this season to squeeze another 24-karat ratings bonanza out of whatever orifice metaphorical golden eggs come out of. And Jerry dutifully complied, putting together -- surprise, surprise! -- a procedural crime drama that goes by the name of Cold Case.

The thing about laying golden eggs, though, is that it's an inexact science. Sure, nine mornings out of ten you might walk into the barn to find a delectable, golden-shelled ovum fit for the frying pan. But every so often, through either a physical miscalculation on the part of the goose or just plain bad luck, a goose turd is going to end up in the basket. And since those are also golden and vaguely ovoid, you might not discover the mistake until you crack through the hardened outer shell halfway through your recipe for a delicious golden omelet.

After watching the first few episodes of Cold Case, I'd say that CBS had better start hosing out the hopper, because something stinks, and it don't smell like huevos rancheros de oro.

Just exactly how this show managed to turn out badly is bit of a mystery to me. Television, in defiance of the laws of physics, has no saturation point for crime dramas. There are already three CSIs, three Law and Orders, even a couple of JAGs, and hardly anybody ever complains about it. All the Cold Case crew had to do was crank out a fourth copy of CSI, make one or two cosmetic changes, and wait for the critical huzzahs to roll in. Instead they chose to deviate greatly from their own proven formula, and the result is a purposeless, improbable bore.

Cold Case is about a Philly homicide detective named Lilly Rush, who one day has a sudden epiphany and decides that her calling is to investigate decades-old unsolved cases. If Cold Case followed the CSI formula, you might expect to tune in each week to watch Lilly apply modern investigative techniques and technologies to these old cases; analyzing ancient DNA samples, digging up long decayed corpses, that sort of thing. And that would actually have made for a pretty cool show.

But you won't find it in Cold Case. Instead, you'll spend the better part of an hour following Lilly around as she endlessly questions the original set of suspects, in the hope that one of them will have changed his story in the intervening years. And yes, that's just as slow-paced and tedious as it sounds.

As for newfangled investigative techniques, so far the only one Lilly has applied is competent police work. Seems the reason that most of these cases weren't closed is that the detectives who originally worked on them were drooling idiots. In the pilot -- basically a note-for-note-retelling of the Martha Moxley/Michael Skakel case -- Lilly solves the thirty-year-old murder by simply interviewing several witnesses who were inexplicably ignored the first time around. The second episode involved a presumably fictional case in which a woman was killed by a bomb that went off in her house. The big break in the investigation comes when Lilly has the brilliant idea of looking for explosive debris in the crawlspace. I guess the gaping holes in the floor weren't reason enough for the police to look down there back in 1983.

Since most of these cases were originally handled so incompetently, Lilly basically has to start at square one, so it's effectively like she's the first detective ever to investigate them. And since she isn't doing anything that the police couldn't have done three decades ago, it makes the idea of these cases being "cold" seem sort of like having to phrase Jeopardy! answers in the form of a question; a pointless and slightly irritating technicality, but the only thing separating the show from a dozen just like it. And like a petulant Alex Trebek, Cold Case keeps insisting that that technicality makes all the difference in the world.

For example, a good chunk of the pilot is spent trying to tell us that the advanced age of these cases somehow makes Lilly's investigation of them that much more noble. The episode begins with Lilly and her colleagues checking out the scene of a triple homicide at a deli in the bad part of town. (Here, by the way, Cold Case seems to have taken a page from CSI's book by presenting us with a brief glimpse of some pretty gruesome gore. But whereas CSI usually has a good excuse for the blood and guts -- such as showing us what a heart looks like when it's exploded by a hollow-point bullet -- this particular scene seems to be there exclusively to pull in the prurient-minded. I'm no prude when it comes to gore. I'll gladly extol the many virtues of George A. Romero's cinematic classic "Dawn of the Dead" to anyone foolhardy enough to listen. But any show that, in its opening minutes, hits us with the image of a dead child lying with the corpses of his parents in a pool of blood on the floor of a dirty bathroom, is clearly not a class act.)

Soon, however, Lilly is presented with some fresh evidence in the thirty-year old killing of a teenage girl, so she decides to forego her investigation into the deli case in order to pursue it. When her co-investigators ask her why, she puffs up and explains, "People shouldn't be forgotten." That's a lovely sentiment, except that Lilly is at that very moment forgetting about the dead ten year old lying in a heap of entrails next to the pooper at Del's Chicken 'n' Ribs. And she's also blowing off a case involving a poor black family in order to crusade for the memory of a white, blue-blood society girl; something I'm fairly confident that her more politically minded superiors might not be too happy about. Maybe naming the character Lilly was supposed to be ironic.

To further remind us that these crimes happened in the past, each episode of Cold Case is peppered with a bunch of cutesy, overwrought gimmicks. Occasionally, and for no apparent reason, a suspect will suddenly appear as his younger self, meaning that he's briefly replaced by a younger actor who sort of looks like him. I'm guessing this is supposed to add poignancy or something, but so far all it's added for me is the distraction of noticing all the glaring differences between the two actors. For instance, at the end of one episode, the 1980s version of the killer is being led away in handcuffs. He passes a pillar and emerges from the other side as his contemporary self, only without the obvious facial mole his younger self was sporting. Either the guy had his mole surgically (and flawlessly) removed at some point -- and on a fireman's salary that seems highly doubtful -- or he just discovered a magical blemish-eliminating pillar. It certainly eliminated my suspension of disbelief handily enough.

Perhaps the most calculated of Cold Case's gimmicks is its damnable musical denouements. Each episode concludes with a montage of the criminal being brought to justice in slow-motion, while meaningful period music plays in the background. These little pastiches have been done before on Bruckheimer's other shows, usually at the end of a two-part episode, and when done right they can be fairly affecting. Here they're just cheesy. An hour's worth of time is not nearly long enough to become invested in any of these characters, so the fact that some dizzy broad's murder has been avenged after oh-so-long doesn't warrant three full minutes of the perp being marched through a deluge, morphing pointlessly between his younger and older self while John Fogerty croaks out "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?"

Worse still, the second episode's montage featured an extended mega-mix of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and Bryan Adams' "Straight From the Heart." In the past, I've been impressed with Bruckheimer's ability to license real music for his shows -- obtaining several tracks from Radiohead's "Hail to the Thief" for CSI several weeks before the album was even released springs to mind. But dredging up the aural horror of Bryan Adams for whatever purpose is a far more heinous crime than any that the Cold Case writers could ever dream up.

Actually, the music is an annoyance in general. Every flashback scene is accompanied with vintage tunes, as if they thought the helpful "May 19, 1983" subtitle wasn't sufficient to get the time period across to viewers, so they had to hammer the point home with some classic Thompson Twins. This goes beyond ham-handed; it's more like two entire pigs flapping around at the end of the director's wrists. And I realize I'm stepping into the land of pedantry here, but the Thompson Twins song in question, "Hold Me Now," wasn't released in the U.S. until February of 1984. No doubt this will only bother the four Thompson Twins in the audience, but it's indicative of the sloppy research that plagues the show.

CSI isn't exactly the height of realism, but the cases themselves at least are usually reasonably logical. Not true of Cold Case. Take the aforementioned 1983 bombing case. When Lilly goes to investigate the burnt husk of a house where the explosion took place, a neighbor wistfully tells her, "Such a shame, them not being able to sell this place." Now I'm no realtor, but maybe they would have had better luck with the sale if somebody had thought to, say, clean the scorch marks off the walls, and perhaps remove the mountain of exploded debris from the crawlspace. Not to mention that twenty years is an awfully long time for the bomber -- who, as it turns out, actually owned the house in question -- not to bother to clean up the incriminating evidence he left behind. As far as I'm concerned, if the writers can't be bothered to find a less ridiculous way for Lilly to locate new evidence, I can't be bothered to give a crap.

Then there's the acting situation. The CSI recipe specifically calls for an ensemble in its list of ingredients, and for good reason. Having several protagonists enables the writers to include multiple plots (in case one of them sucks) and to make any necessary adjustments to the cast (in case one of them is Kim Delaney). Cold Case, however, focuses almost exclusively on a single detective. The rest of the squad shows up every so often, hanging around the station, drinking coffee, and supplying key details whenever it's convenient, but for the most part they're bit players. Which is kind of a problem, because Kathryn Morris, who plays Lilly, is horrible.

Morris' acting repertoire consists entirely of a smirk. Not a jaded, world-weary smirk that might actually fit her character, but a vacuous, smirking-at-nothing-in-particular smirk that suggests that the corners of her mouth are simply being pulled upwards by the vacuum between her ears. She even smirks when she's delivering her requisite "tough cop" dialogue; and if lines like, "No you don't [know me], because if you did you'd know I'm just getting started," weren't already ruined by her inflection-free delivery, they would be obliterated anyway by the inappropriate shit-eating grin on her mug.

That gritty dialogue also highlights another problem with Morris. You'd expect Lilly, experienced homicide detective that she is, to be hardened and brassy, and probably a little bit buff, especially considering that she's a female on a mostly-male force. But Morris is a creampuff. She's totally non-intimidating, and looks more like the kind of girl that cries during thunderstorms than the sort that daily stares steely-eyed into the gaping maw of death. And it doesn't help that they've tried to toughen her image by giving her the kind of carelessly disheveled look that can only be achieved by dropping a c-note at the hair salon.

Her hairstyle, by the way, is just plain ludicrous. I'm sure they were trying to make it appear that Lilly just rolled out of bed and ran straight to the station house, but it looks to me more like she went into Supercuts with a deck of Pokemon cards, pulled one out at random, and told the stylist, "Make me look like I have this guy on my head." (If I had to guess, I'd say she drew #73, Tentacruel. Which, by the way, means that she's at a distinct advantage when fighting criminals who have fire, ground, or rock type Pokemon on their heads.)

If Cold Case can be said to have a partially redeeming feature, it's that the flashback scenes are done very well. They have a stylish, dark atmosphere and are filmed with a neat, blurry effect that perfectly conveys that you're seeing the stuff of memories. Unfortunately, we've seen this kind of imagery so many times on CSI that it's become pretty commonplace, and doesn't do nearly enough to make up for the show's myriad problems.

So overall, Cold Case is a mess, largely because this CSI clone isn't CSI-ey enough. To put it in terms that Bruckheimer can appreciate, Cold Case is like a bad copycat serial killer. Sure, they offed a guy with a ten-inch butcher knife, but they forgot to cut off his eyelids, they didn't apply the henna tattoo of a duckling to his left thigh, and they completely forgot to lop off his testicles and attach them to his forehead with purple pipe cleaners.

Truth be told, that doesn't seem to matter a hell of a lot. Cold Case's ratings have so far been dandy. It remains to be seen what happens when The Simpsons is no longer preempted by baseball, but for now, it looks like CBS and Bruckheimer have another golden egg in their basket.

If I were you, though, I wouldn't try to eat it.

My five-year-old niece graduated from preschool this summer, in a ceremony complete with diplomas and munchkin-sized caps and gowns. And as part of the event, along with the slightly disorderly processional and ceremonial singing of Raffi tunes, the preschool teacher announced what each of her young charges wanted to be when they grew up.

My niece's choice? A teacher and a mommy.

We have pinned the blame for this on my mother, who holds an disproportionately large influence over her granddaughter. My mother is both a teacher and a mommy herself -- which, in itself, is pretty compelling circumstantial evidence and certainly enough to acquit other likely culprits -- and has thus concluded that those occupations are the most fitting for young professional women. The mommying, mostly, and not so much the teaching. She is relentlessly persuasive, my mother -- lock her in a room with Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf for an hour or so, and they would emerge desperate to receive their teaching certification and start issuing progeny at a speedy clip. So, really, what chance does a five-year-old have?

A few weeks back, we were baby-sitting the niece, when she announced her latest career plans. "Teacher and mommy?" I asked, knowing full well my mother's 24-7-approach to propaganda. "No," the niece declared. "I want to be an artist and astronaut."

Which, you have to concede, is a dramatic shift in focus, skills and basic job requirements from the occupation of teacher and mommy. And I'm told this is only the latest in a line of seismic shifts in my niece's career goals. At last count, potential vocations included -- but were not necessarily limited to -- horseback rider, actress, drill major, jeweler, painter, mermaid and kitty. Not kitty doctor. Just kitty.

Hey, she's five years old. What five year old without the middle name Amadeus knows what he or she wants to be when she grows up? I figure she's got another three, four years to settle on something or another and commit to it for the next couple of decades. Five years if she's some sort of slacker.

Much like my niece, the new dramatic series Las Vegas is not really sure what it wants to be when it grows up. However, unlike my niece -- who has an entire lifetime in front of her to suss matters out -- Las Vegas is on the airwaves now and its window of opportunity to pick a direction and stick with it is rapidly slamming shut. My niece can at least blame her capricious whims on the fact that she's only now reached the kindergarten years; Las Vegas has no such luxury, unless, of course, it comes out that the show is produced, written and edited by five-year-olds.

Which is not necessarily outside the realm of possibility, come to think of it.

I watched the first five-pack of Las Vegas episodes from start to finish, with no distractions, no multi-tasking, not even any potty breaks. From the opening teaser to the final credit, I have given five hours worth of Las Vegas my undivided attention.

And I have no idea what this show is supposed to be about. In that sense, I have a lot in common with Las Vegas' producers.

I mean, the ostensible leads of the show are the great James Caan, who plays the head of security at the fictional Montecito Resort & Casino, and the not-even-fractionally-as-great Josh Duhamel, who plays Anakin to Caan's Obi-Wan. Each episode has featured them thwarting some sort of plot to cheat the Montecito out of its hard-earned millions, whether it's a sophisticated blackjack scam using X-ray specs and PDAs or a sting operation to bring down the casino-swindling network of Elliot Gould. And while it's kind of odd to be rooting for a major corporation to prevent enterprising-if-amoral crooks from swiping money that it's already swiped fair and square from folks like you and me -- sort of like a watching a show where you root for representatives of the cable company to track down and prosecute people with illegal cable boxes -- this is what Las Vegas is about, is it not? A slick-and-glitzy look at both the glamorous nightlife and the seedy demimonde of Las Vegas through the eyes of two men -- one of them talented, the other not so much -- who ferret out the con-men and shysters who give gambling a bad name.

Right?

Well... not exactly. Because Las Vegas has also spent a goodly portion of its first few weeks on the air showcasing the dynamic duo of Caan and Duhamel as they fight crime. In episode two, Duhamel's Danny McCoy tracks down the loan shark what done killed his best friend, while in episode five, Caan's Big Ed Deline devotes his energies toward capturing the serial date rapist who made the poor career move of attempting to ply his trade on Big Ed's daughter. So that would make Las Vegas a gritty crime drama, by most people's standards.

Except that it's not -- and not just because both the murder and date-rape storylines were wrapped up long before it would take a microwaved burrito to cool. No, Las Vegas isn't a gritty crime drama or a show about putting the skids on scam artists in the coo-coo-crazy Vegas scene because it seems far more interested in soapy contretemps and cheesy entanglements. Take Big Ed's daughter, Delinda -- played to deleterious effect by the uninterestingly wooden Molly Sims. She's dating Danny, which makes things awkward for his working relationship with Big Ed, not to mention the other women on Las Vegas (Vanessa Marcil, Marsha Thomason and the always delightful, never objectionable Nikki Cox) who wouldn't mind taking Danny's roulette wheel for a spin. Only, by episode four, Delinda's handed Danny his walking papers, which ratchets up the awkwardness all around and increases the potential for various and sundry Sweeps-inspired couplings. So you might reasonably conclude that Las Vegas really is a Melrose Place with two-drink minimums, progressive slots and no Andrew Shue stinking up the joint.

Again, you'd be wrong, because when it's not featuring gritty crime, light-hearted casino capers, and cheesy soap-opera romances between Josh Duhamel and a toothy human blank, Las Vegas is also working in plotlines about the various and sundry guests visiting the Montecito each week. We've been treated to stories about a hypocritical U.S. Senator who loves slot-machines and strippers as much as he loves decrying America's moral decay, a screwy performer at one of the casino's shows who thinks he's actually King Arthur, Ed's yokel cousin from Trenton marrying a grifter in a kooky Vegas wedding, and -- in perhaps the most sensible Las Vegas plotline of all -- a suave illusionist/psychic putting the moves on Nikki Cox. So Las Vegas is all about people coming to Sin City for adventure, for excitement, for love exciting and new. All that's missing is Fred "Gopher" Grandy trying to find a way to sneak Charo into the nightclub and Ted Lange doing that double-finger-pointing hepcat thing of his while he mixes Jimmy Caan up a screwdriver.

Yes, Las Vegas is all these things and more. Which is to say that Las Vegas is a big, sprawling, directionless mess.

A typical installment of Las Vegas features three, and sometimes as many as four, separate plotlines, each one featuring a different focus and contrasting tone. Some plots are light-hearted and zany, others are as serious as a heart attack -- all are half-developed, forced, and rushed to their conclusion, so that the show can zip off to its next half-developed, forced and rushed story arc. It's as if the producers of Las Vegas are throwing whatever they can against the wall to see if anything sticks; whatever does, well, there's your show. Las Vegas feels like it was assembled at the whim of a focus group and shaped by the consensus of a committee -- and considering the ability of focus groups and committees to settle on one direction and see it through to the bitter end, that's not at all good for Las Vegas' prospects for improvement.

(More than idle speculation has brought me to the conclusion that nearly everyone in the employ of General Electric is besieging the producers of Las Vegas with notes and suggestions. When the show was first announced last spring, Cox's character was supposed to be a hooker. In the assorted fall preview stories about Las Vegas appearing just before show debuted, we were told that Cox wasn't portraying a hooker at all, but rather an escort. By the time Las Vegas debuted, Cox's Mary Connell was introduced to viewers as the casino's "special events director" -- a special events director who referred to her well-to-do gentlemen companions as "dates" much in the same way that an escort or hooker might, but a special events coordinator nevertheless. This sudden change in professions for Cox's character, coupled with some rather obvious dubbed-in dialogue that expunged all mentions of hooking, suggests that someone somewhere in the Peacock Network concluded at the last minute that a show featuring a character making a go of it in the oft-misunderstood world of prostitution might result in NBC fielding an angry phone call or two, leading to immediate changes to the script. More damning for Las Vegas, it suggests that the show is being assembled on the fly, and you don't exactly have to be Victor Hugo to figure out what that means as far as cohesive plotting, narrative pacing and long-term character development.)

Lord, I want to like this show. It features gambling, something I have a Bill Bennett-sized jones for, and centers on Las Vegas, perhaps the most narratively interesting city this side of Dickensian London or Leonard-esque South Florida. I hold most Vegas-themed movies and shows near and dear to my heart. I believe "Ocean's 11" -- the original with Sammy, Frank and Dino and not the remake with the ungainly broad from "Erin Brockovich" -- to be a watershed film in the American cinematic canon, a testament to a simpler time when you could drink and smoke and carouse and rob four casinos on New Year's Eve and the only consequence you'd have to worry about would be getting the stink-eye from Cesar Romero. Most important, Las Vegas affords me the opportunity to watch Nikki Cox, under the guise of legitimate TV criticism, thus sparing me from the indignity of having to come up with excuses the wife will believe about the Web sites I've been visiting lately.

But I can't like this show. I certainly can't recommend it. Another episode of Las Vegas' mismashed plots and rudderless story-telling, and I'm not even sure I can endure it.

Which is not to say Las Vegas is beyond salvation. If I were running things, the first thing I'd do -- after blocking all incoming calls from Burbank and carelessly "losing" all the "helpful" advice sent my way from well-meaning NBC executives -- would be to sharpen the show's focus. I'd make it all about Jimmy Caan and his young apprentice, busting cheats and giving the bum's rush to scoundrels. Las Vegas has four female characters, which is about two too many -- I'd giving Vanessa Marcil her walking papers and return Molly Sims to the forest where the lonely woodsman first carved her from the husk of an oak tree. I'd try an capture that 1960 "Ocean's 11" vibe -- in the tone, in the dialogue, in the overall attitude -- with just enough of an update to the look and feel of the show to make it relevant to today's audience.

But that's just what I'd do. Las Vegas could go in a completely opposite direction -- make Molly Sims the star of the show and throw in enough credulity-straining plot twists to make Dynasty viewers roll their eyes, for all I care. Just do something, anything, definitive with the show's focus and direction. Because even the worst decision the producers could make would be better than the non-decision that's made Las Vegas the amorphous mess it is right now.

Joan of Arcadia tries hard not to be easily labeled. It's a family show with just enough tang in its relationships to keep it from being overly sappy. One of the show's leads is the chief of police, but the show itself has very little to do with police work. And although the show's title character, Joan Girardi (Amber Tamblyn), talks to God on the regular basis, Joan of Arcadia does not bear the obvious religious baggage of a Touched by an Angel or Highway to Heaven.

If there's any label we can give Joan, it's High Concept. Joan, the daughter of the police chief of Arcadia in the great state of Unknown, receives visitations from God. In this Joan of Arc.'s case, however, the visitations come in the form of garbage men and cute high-school boys who are actually God, or being possessed by God, or something like that. Feel the edges of the concept and most of us can fill in the blanks: her family thinks she's crazy, but she's got a friend who understands her, and the messages from God lead her into situations where she gets to do good and help an angel get his wings.

But that's not this show. Joan of Arcadia can't be divined from its high concept. Joan doesn't confide in anybody about her relationship with God. God's messages are rarely straightforward, and when they are, the results of following His orders are often subtle and sometimes impossible to understand. Joan's family is quite supportive of her, albeit somewhat perplexed by her sudden shift from a whatever teenager into one with an actual engagement in the world.

Joan's older brother, Kevin (played brilliantly by John Ritter's son Jason), is wheelchair bound after a recent car accident. Again, you see the shape of a movie-of-the-week plot line involving a traumatized family learning to love each other, and the inspirational tale of a handicapped kid who learns to appreciate life. But the details of how Joan handles Kevin's story again play against expectations. Joan doesn't extract a miracle from God that makes her brother walk again, and while the family is traumatized, it's not in an easy, melodramatic way.

In fact, Kevin's relationship with his mother Helen (Mary Steenburgen) is painfully real, the sweet and sour mixed-up ball of feelings that you'd expect from most young adults as they struggle to become individuals and change the way they relate to their parents. Helen struggles to motivate Kevin to move on with his life even as she herself continues to question why the accident happened and how her oldest son ended up a paraplegic.

Meanwhile, Joan's dad Will (Joe Mantegna, another excellent casting choice) is the chief of police -- but it's no simplified honey-I'm-home sort of cop job. Instead, he's the new chief of police in a small town rife with small town politics. In the show's first few episodes, you get the sense that it's going to be a rough ride for the new chief -- and that no amount of crime-solving prowess is going to save him from playing the political games he's going to need to play in order to keep his job.

Some critics are complaining about the lack of religion in a show whose main character talks to God -- one saying that the show's philosophy is "a clueless stumble toward self-actualization, a chaos-theory Samaritanism." But that's not quite right. Joan's mom repeatedly confronts a local priest (David Burke of The Tick in a really funny part) in a parking lot to ask him probing questions about the nature of faith. And, of course, there's God -- who knows everything but refuses to tell Joan anything other than what she needs to know.

In many ways, isn't that portrayal of God exactly right? Religion is about faith. God does not flit about the globe like Superman, righting wrongs and fighting crime. I haven't seen very much evidence of miracles on CNN lately. Hokey shows like Touched by an Angel are fantasies, portraying a level of religious intervention that's ridiculous, no matter how inspiring they might be to some.

In Joan's world, God is working all around us, but on His terms. We don't get to see any miracles. Human beings are the conduits for the causes that lead to effects. Bad things still happen to good people, and we don't understand why. Yes, there is a strain of Samaritanism in Joan, and a whole lot of self-actualization. But the end result is something that's also spiritual, serious, and searching. The characters of Joan of Arcadia are muddling through with their lives, trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong, trying to be good people. And in Joan's case, trying to literally do what God says she should do. She gets it from the horse's mouth, and it's still not as easy as it sounds.

I don't want to over-promise the philosophical element of Joan of Arcadia. It's got more of it than your average series, I'll grant you, but it's also a strong family drama with its share of humor and conflict. Its cast is first-rate.

And after seeing several episodes, I think I can finally stick a label on Joan of Arcadia. From Joan's mid-adolescent course correction to her brother's disability to her dad's tough new job, it's a show about people defying expectations. Quite fitting for a show that has defied all of ours, and turned into one of the real gems of the fall season.

I know what you've been wondering. The question burning unquenchably in your mind is this: What are Clancy Brown, Adrienne Barbeau, and that midget from Twin Peaks doing these days?

The answer is yet another one of HBO's edgy original series, Carnivàle. Clancy Brown plays a minister who may or may not be the bad guy, Adrienne Barbeau flashes some skin as a carnival snake charmer, and that midget from Twin Peaks, Michael J. Anderson, (not surprisingly) plays a midget, but this time he's a midget who runs a carnival.

They're all supporting characters surrounding Nick Stahl, as some kind of good guy, who can heal (and maybe raise the dead) with his touch; and the deeply beautiful Clea Duvall, who does tarot card readings and is ostensibly the love interest.

You can tell she's the love interest because she's the only cast member not covered entirely in dirt. It's the Great Depression, you see, and we start off in Grapes of Wrath, Oklahoma, so, you know, everything is dirty.

That's all you'll get from me on plot because it's just about all I could figure out from the first two episodes. Apparently the show is about some struggle between Good and Evil, played respectively -- I think -- by Stahl and Brown, and I only figured out that much because Anderson helpfully comes on at the beginning of the very first show and pretty much says that's what the show's about. Good thing, too, because otherwise I'd be hopelessly lost.

Aside from that -- and everything is pretty much aside from that in Carnivàle -- we follow this travelling carnival around the country while unexplainable things happen. You might assume, at some point, everything will be explained. You'd be very optimistic to make that assumption, but what the hey.

The show has more in common with Twin Peaks than just Michael J. Anderson and incomprehensible plotting. It also has many quirky characters, a lot of relationships which are only hinted at, an oppressive atmosphere, and strong production design. What it does not have, which is what made Twin Peaks such a great show, is any sense of humor. At all. Not even one iota. This show is serious with a capital SER.

Nick Stahl's big acting choice with the character of Ben Hawkins is to have him walk like his balls itch something fierce. He's got maybe three lines per episode and otherwise he just mooches around staring at the (dirty) ground through his (dirty) forelock and frowning (dirtily), all the while gimping along with this half-limp (through the dirt).

Limping seems to be the gold standard for acting on this show: About half the characters limp and most of the rest slouch. They're all depressed, I guess, what with this being the Great Depression and all.

Not that it matters since just about all of that is overwhelmed by Dan Bishop's production design. He populates the screen with dirt -- lots of dirt, don't forget the dirt, they probably have to import dirt by the barrel -- and gritty signs and scuffed corners and peeling paint and... and... and... so much damned ugly stuff that my eyes started to water. The whole show is frayed, unraveling, flapping, torn, ragged, unkempt. Hordes of second assistant directors are just off-camera urging their team to toss more dirt into the fans so every scene looks like it's in a windblown sandbox. Armies of young costumers are sent out each day of filming to grind brand-new jeans into the dust. Visine ought to be a sponsor.

And after all that, what do we have? Really, just some tired old saw about how the old-time carnival is actually the heart of weirdness and darkness.

I think of the carnival the same way I think about fireworks. Back 150 years ago, when you lived in a town where everything was shades of gray and brown and you never saw anything else because you were too illiterate and too tied to the land to go anywhere, entertainment came to you, and the entertainment was fireworks and carnivals, and they seemed great -- incredible, really -- because you were nothing but a yokel who'd never seen anything more exciting than the south end of a north-bound steer. Well, newsflash: It's 150 years later and we have new, more exciting types of entertainment, like television, and Websites writing about television, and videogames, and MP3s. Once upon a time, you could only see bright colors at a fireworks show. Now I can get better color on an elderly Trinitron. Time was you needed a sideshow to see freaks of nature. Now they're anchoring the evening news.

But since Ray Bradbury, we've apparently decided, as a culture, that carnivals are something other than dim-witted and outdated entertainment. We've decided that they're something more. Something deeper. Something dark and sinister.

But they're not. Clowns aren't some conduit into the dimmest recesses of our unconscious. Clowns are just supposed to be funny. Only they're not funny anymore because now we have Chris Rock and George W. Bush.

Alas, Carnivàle creator Daniel Knauf didn't get my memo. He still thinks this is some kind of fantastic idea, using the carnival as a nexus of magic and wonderment and weirdness and stuff. Strange symbolism abounds in the carnival: Midgets! Tattoos! Bearded ladies! Absinthe! Strippers! Ferris wheels! Snake charmers! Strongmen! It's a hack writer's wet dream!

It just isn't very original or interesting for the viewer. You might as well go back and re-read "Something Wicked This Way Comes." It has the excuse of being first published in 1962, based on Bradbury's actual memories of travelling carnivals, and thus not being a derivative slog through the cultural dumpster.

Maybe Knauf figures he can overcome the worn-out basis of his material through labyrinthine plotting and overzealous production design. But he's wrong. The plotting is pointless. There's a lot of meandering and nothing much happens to advance the story. Ben Hawkins finds an old photo in a carnival trailer! It's of his mother! It means... we don't know what it means. No one else does, either. And in two hours of television that's the big event. This makes The X-Files look about as confusing as a recipe for ice.

And the production design -- who gives a crap about production design? When it's more interesting than the characters, that's not a sign of good design, it's a sign of bad writing.

In the end, with all the minor plot points and non-events, with all the limping and the dirt, with all the "Whoa, carnivals are so, like, creepy, man!" moments, I found myself facing just one question in two parts: Who gives people the money to make shows like this? Does Adrienne Barbeau need work that badly?