Sparkler among the bombs

What should I do when my sheet of paper is blank?

That's the question I posed to my wife Mary after viewing one of the new TV series. When I watch a program I plan to review, I keep a pen and paper handy to jot down notes about what I like and don't like.

After seeing "Jesse," an NBC comedy, I glanced at the paper. I had written nothing down. "What should I do?" I asked Mary, who watched with me.

"Tell people there's nothing there worth seeing," she replied succinctly.

And with that, I can proceed to four other autumn newcomers:

* "The Hughleys," an ABC sitcom about a black family that moves into a white suburb, surprised me with its gentle humor. That's a rarity this fall when most sitcoms, "Jesse" included, are packed with genital references. (The fall premiere of an old series, "Mad About You," centered on Viagra and was an embarrassment.)

On "The Hughleys," the one-liners and predicaments echo previous sitcoms of a similar nature, especially "The Jeffersons" and "Benson." A couple of them even harkened back as far as "Julia." It also has an addled dad and children who go to bed right after eating dinner even though the sun is blazing through the windows, two products of 1950s' television.

But helping to set the balance right is the good heart at the center of the series, which tries to bridge racial divisions by showing the commonality of people. If that message can be sent to families through jokes that don't make everyone blush, the series deserves to stay on.

* "Encore! Encore!" on NBC stars Nathan Lane as a retired opera singer who descends on his family's California vineyard to disrupt the lives of his mother, sister and nephew. Playing Joe (his real name), Nathan is appropriately operatic, which I find very funny. He's so extravagant in his language and gestures that whatever he says or does makes me laugh.

But nothing else of interest occurred during the program, and the first show spent a lot of time implying that the main character is an alcoholic. If that's played for laughs, there should be no encore for this program.

* "Sports Night" on ABC is the sort of series that makes me rifle hurriedly through my medicine cabinet for sedatives. Either the actors are going to take them or I am.

The setting is a cable sports show where being hectic is the name of the game and people rush around shouting at one another. All of this hubbub, peppered with arcane lingo about athletics, is, in the end, much ado about nothing.

The series also suffers from trying to be a comedy-drama. Shows which try to be both are usually neither.

* "L.A. Doctors," a CBS hour-long drama, is about as different from other medical series as Advil is from Orudis. If you ache to see medical personnel, any relief will do.

Well, actually, there is one difference. The docs on this show have an inordinate amount of free time on their hands. One drops in on a patient to have a beer and watch a ball game. Another drifts off to the seashore to chat with a 14-year-old who is pregnant. Two of them drive over to see her parents.

The premise -- several physicians form a medical group -- isn't fetching. The characters -- ideal young doc, philandering middle-age doc, attractive female doc -- are cliches. But I'll give the writers this much: The first hour went by without the use of the word "stat."

My prescription: Find something else to do.

(10-08-98) [[In-content Ad]]