Soft balls

TV's fuzzy premiere week

by Robert David Sullivan

Timothy Daly in 'The Fugitive'

When George W. Bush talks about the "soft prejudice of low expectations," he's referring to the public-school system, but the phrase also sums up the new TV season. There were a few promising new shows last week, plus the return of the red-hot West Wing, but just about every program had something in it that made me wonder, "How stupid do they think we are?"

In last week's presidential debate, Bush and Al Gore certainly did their part to dumb down the medium. Both pandered to senior citizens and to middle-class parents whose biggest concern is shielding their children from naughty language on TV. This annoyed me at first, but as I watched more of the networks' entertainment fare, I saw the debates as a small gesture toward two groups who are otherwise being frozen out of prime time. Last Friday, for example, older viewers who have come to rely on CBS for shows like Touched by an Angel had to watch a maggot being fished out of a corpse's eye (an improved logo for the network, perhaps?) on the fast-paced crime drama C.S.I. On the same night, ABC has replaced its family-friendly sit-coms with such leering comedies as Norm (which has been promoted with posters over urinals in New York City men's rooms).

So maybe it's only fair to let the seniors and soccer moms monopolize politics. Maybe young people abstain from voting as a courtesy, because they want their elders to feel important and needed. It's just like that episode of My Three Sons (or was it Family Affair?) where the kids clean the house, then mess it up again so that poor, unappreciated Uncle Charley won't put a gun in his mouth. Forget MTV's "Rock the Vote" campaign; Nick at Nite is the place to learn about civic duty.

Or you could just hop on the West Wing bandwagon. The NBC drama (Wednesdays at 9 p.m.) won a record nine Emmy awards this year, and last week's season premiere was a ratings blockbuster. These two developments usually spell trouble for any good series, and The West Wing may not be able to resist the ER formula of emphasizing sentimental moments suitable for network promos instead of coherent storylines. The two-hour season premiere -- which revealed that President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and aide Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) had been injured in an assassination attempt -- was not reassuring. All the major characters, except for hangdog Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), seemed to have had their edges rounded off during summer break. Flashbacks explained how they joined Bartlet's presidential campaign, and each vignette was a bland lesson in integrity. Bartlet, as a candidate, was the most principled of them all, telling a dairy farmer that "I screwed you" by voting against a program to keep milk prices artificially high.

I admit the dairy-farmer scene was thrilling, another example of a West Wing signature moment that makes you think, "Why can't politics be like this?" And when Leo McGarry (John Spencer) explained his decision to work for Bartlet with "I'm tired of settling for a guy who can speak in complete sentences," I could hear the sighs of reluctant Gore supporters from all over the country. But the episode never answered the question raised by such moments: how did our hero prevail in a political system that so efficiently eliminates straight-talking candidates like John McCain? I'm not asking for total realism here, and last season I was willing to accept that Bartlet somehow got to the White House, but as a Law & Order judge would point out, the West Wing producers opened the door to this line of questioning when they flashed back to the campaign.

William Peterson and Marg Helgenberger in 'C.S.I.'

Last year, Bartlet often seemed in danger of turning into Bill Clinton without the cigar: a well-intentioned but overcautious Democrat who lived in fear of public-opinion polls. There was a great scene in which a retiring Supreme Court justice laced into the president for staying close to the yellow line ("I wanted a Democrat and I got you"). This theme laid the groundwork for the effective storyline, late in the season, in which Bartlet decided to go for broke and attack his conservative critics. But if The West Wing is now to be populated entirely by full-time angels, we're not going to care when the music swells up and they decide to follow their hearts.

AS FOR THE NEW SHOWS, the week got off to a shaky start with NBC's Deadline (Mondays at 9 p.m.), which stars Oliver Platt as a hard-drinking newspaper columnist and crime solver. The premiere had Platt working against the clock to overturn the convictions of two men on death row, a plot that made me wish I were watching His Girl Friday instead. Near the end of the episode, the police interrupted their interrogation of a murder suspect and allowed Platt's character to try his luck at getting a confession. Because I briefly worked as a crime reporter on a daily newspaper, I found this spirit of cooperation between the police and the press rather difficult to swallow.

A more pleasant surprise was the WB's Gilmore Girls (Thursdays at 8 p.m.), a cute and funny show about a 32-year-old single mother (Lauren Graham) and her bright 16-year-old daughter (Alexis Bledel). They live in a small town in Connecticut where the mother manages an inn populated by such quirky characters as an accident-prone chef and a sarcastic desk clerk. Unfortunately, we also have to watch Graham's character deal with her super-rich and super-obnoxious parents. The father is played by Edward Herrmann, but his scenes would be more realistic if he were replaced by a cel drawing of Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. Series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino should work out any hostility toward her parents in therapy sessions, not in prime time.

The Fugitive (Fridays at 8 p.m. on CBS) is, of course, a remake of the 1963-'67 series about an escaped prisoner trying to find his wife's one-armed killer before he's recaptured and executed for the crime. Tim Daly, of Wings, has the title role, and he's plenty likable, which is precisely the problem. (It's unintentionally funny when we hear a police-radio description of him as "extremely dangerous.") In the old series, the brooding, tight-lipped David Janssen seemed as if he could have murdered his wife. We knew the truth, but we could also see how a jury would vote to strap this guy's ass to an electric chair. As he criss-crossed the country, women fell in love with him because he looked dangerous, not because he looked familiar from a pleasantly goofy sit-com.

Sarah Michelle Gellar in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'

The flashy-but-hollow Fugitive is followed by another crime drama, C.S.I. (which stands for Crime Scene Investigators). It's hard to hate a show in which Marg Helgenberger, playing a seasoned police detective, tells a new recruit that she'll feel "like King Kong on cocaine" after solving her first crime. I've got to assume that she has some idea what's she's talking about, and I don't mean that she's scaled the Empire State Building. The CBS censors were really out to lunch -- or just lost their lunch -- when they screened last week's pilot, which included numerous close-ups of corpses, a woman vomiting, and William Petersen yelling, "You assholes!"

C.S.I. does offer an engrossing mix of crimes. The pilot included one murder made to look like a suicide and another murder made to look like a home invasion, but also a liquor-store robbery and a ring of prostitutes who "roll" their clients. Some of the clues were pretty nifty, too, such as a fingerprint that came from a fake arm. (It's prosthetic-limb Friday on CBS!) But much of the hard-boiled dialogue is just dumb, and the show is weighed down by a cliché left over from the '70s: the hard-boiled superior who yells at the detectives for following their instincts. Doesn't he know they're going to be right every week?

A PERSON WHO LOOKS DOWN on all forms of television -- such as Bette Midler, who explained, "I'd never watch anything stupider than me" in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine story about her new sit-com -- would have pretty low expectations for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on the WB). On the other hand, anyone who's followed TV criticism for the past four years knows that Buffy has received such lavish praise that a first-time viewer is bound to be disappointed. A recent valentine by occasional Phoenix contributor Steve Vineberg in the New York Times, for example, warned that "adults who underestimate the depth and intelligence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer do so at their own peril."

At the risk of angering Buffy fans, I'd say that anyone who watches a single episode is going to get the point pretty quickly. Buffy Summers is an attractive young resident of Sunnydale, California (first a high-schooler, now a college student), who has the power and the duty to battle vampires, zombies, and all kinds of malevolent beings. Except for a few close friends, no one understands Buffy's hard-knock life, and this gothic horror series is really a metaphor for adolescent angst, with the packs of monsters representing high-school cliques and various magical powers standing in for the characters' sexual drives, and so on. It's a good premise, but that's not enough -- otherwise, a lazy piece of satire like Bewitched would be as much fun to watch as it is to talk about.

Depending on the episode, Buffy can be either very smart or not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. The first two episodes of the new season covered both ends of this continuum. On the season premiere, Dracula (yes, the Dracula) visited Sunnydale and worked his charms on Buffy, who let him chomp on her neck and flirted with crossing over to the dark side. When the episode was about to end, Buffy suddenly found the strength to resist him. She put a stake in his heart (but it was unclear whether he was gone for good) and made a few wisecracks about clichés from Dracula movies. Overall, the hour was a weak parody tarted up with a few nods toward female empowerment. Not much depth there.

But last week's episode, in which Buffy had to take care of her clingy younger sister while battling an airhead female vampire named Harmony, was a screechfest. In contrast to the Dracula outing, there were plenty of intersecting themes that seemed fresh and funny, including sibling rivalry, hero worship, and male resentment of a woman in authority (Harmony had trouble controlling her "minions"). If there's a pattern to this show, it may be that original plots work better than homages to horror classics. So if you see a WB promo in which Buffy performs an exorcism, it should be a no-brainer to watch something else that week.