Nothing to write home about

So far, nothing I've seen of the new TV season has sent me to my knees to thank Divinity for the creation of cathode rays.

"Cosby" is a charming little show that gives the eponymous Bill a chance to droop his jowls and roll his eyes to the squealy delight of the audience. I've let go of a few chuckles while watching it.

The series focuses on a newly fired man struggling to retain his dignity, but nothing that serious is attempted. Instead, the jokes are about urine specimens, wet pants, burned turtles and hitting old women over the head with flower pots. It is, in other words, a series of vaudeville sketches rather than a comic unity.

The show unfolds at such a leisurely pace that I want to lie down with a shawl on for a short nap, something Cosby was famous for doing on his last sitcom and which he continues on this one.

Among swine

Much more energetic, loud and snappish is "Pearl," with Rhea Perlman as an older woman going back to college and running into a brick wall named Pynchon, a snooty professor who wants two things: his own way and the absence of Pearl. There will be no napping during this vociferous half-hour.

A show that has two literary references to Nathaniel Hawthorne in its main characters' names can't be all bad; and its feisty put-downs are delivered with enough of a smile to blunt the cruelty that lies at the heart of much TV humor these days.

As for "Mr. Rhodes," another classroom clownfest, I am still a traditionalist when it comes to acting. That is, I like actors to act rather than to pretend like schoolchildren with knowing grins that declare: "Look at me; I'm actin'!" The star of this series, like Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres and Roseanne [insert current last name here], doesn't even make an attempt at acting. It's painful to witness.

So are the plots, slim little things constructed of wispy ideas and so flecked with one-liners that my wife Mary asked, "Is this a stand-up act or a show?"

Paranoid night

I thought I might like most if not all of NBC's paranoid Saturday lineup -- "Dark Skies," "The Pretender" and "Profiler" -- but none of them has lived up to the pre-season hype.

"Dark Skies" struggles mightily to scare us with squirmy aliens that inhabit humans and like to pop out of their mouths like candy from a pinata, but that trick has been done so often and so badly so many times before that it looks like something "Mystery Science Theater 3000" would laugh at.

"The Pretender" makes the fatal error of not showing us how the main character, a genius able to become anything from a surgeon to an airline pilot, does what he does. In the first episode, for example, he stole five million dollars and convinced a hospital that he could perform life-saving heart operations; but we never found out how he did it.

The fun of "Mission: Impossible" and similar series is that we are let in on the planning and execution. On "The Pretender," we get only the "ta-da," never the preparations that lead up to it.

"Profiler" wallows in flashbacks and photos of corpses as the lead character, an FBI consultant, melds her mind with serial killers. To add to the body count, she herself is the object of one. We get more of the nitty-gritty details here than on "The Pretender," but the nitty is a bit too gritty. How many bloody cadavers do you want to view in morgues right before nighty-night time?

(10-17-96)

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