BY TOM GLIATTO
DRAMA
The third season of Denis Leary's series about a New York City firefighter debuts May 30. You could say it comes roaring back.
These characters' tongues should all be covered in ashes from so much daily bitterness, and their eyes stinging from both tears and embers: Tommy Gavin (Leary) is a recovering substance abuser with a marriage torn apart after his young son was killed by a drunk driver. His father (Charles Durning) is a sad, declining old man. His station chief (Jack McGee) can't afford the payments to keep his wife, sick with Alzheimer's, in the nice clinic she thinks is an art school. In one tough scene, the chief's brother-in-law, a car dealer, refuses to lend a hand financially. The chief, on the way out, keys one of the showroom models.
But Leary is also a producer and creator of the show, and every so often the bitterness is blasted away with tart, smart humor. Tommy is both fascinated and appalled to learn that his teenage godson Damien is having an affair with a high school teacher. "I had Sister Mary Shovel Face," Leary says, as always spitting out his lines with a fine trail of venom. "You get Sharon Stone." When one of the firefighters decides to get a grip on his drinking problem, he goes to the self-help section of a bookstore and steals The Tao of Pooh—a funny but incredibly touching moment.
[3.5 stars]
VH1 (Sundays, 9 p.m. ET)
REALITY
You wouldn't exactly say the relationship between Christopher Knight and Adrianne Curry has mellowed since the first season of My Fair Brady. But the 48-year-old Brady Bunch star and his 23-year-old fiancée, winner of America's Next Top Model Season 1 and a nonstop talker, are less abrasive this time. They're almost cute—and the show's better. They still squabble over issues small (the cost of his tuxedo) or large (whether he should get a vasectomy). But cultivating love in the hothouse of reality TV can't be easy. She sometimes conveys real insecurity about losing him. "I don't have cold feet," Knight reassures her, "just chilly toes."
[2.5 stars]
ABC (May 23, 8 p.m. ET)
HORROR
Imagine your television set as a tin bucket. Now imagine Stephen King vomiting his subconscious into it.
Stephen King's Desperation, with a script by the horror master himself based on his 1996 novel, is an unsettling, undisciplined, illogical dreamlike mess. Into the framework of a simple tale of dread and suspense—a small Southwestern town overwhelmed by a mysterious, malignant force—King stuffs (in no particular order) tarantulas and snakes, urinals that overflow with blood, salivating killer dogs, Chinese miners, a dead girl spirit who leaves behind a neon-green bar of soap and living corpses whose flesh begins to crack open like overbaked bread. Oh—and Vietnam. Mustn't forget Vietnam.
It's all potently disgusting over the course of three hours, but I kept thinking instead of Lost. That series has become something of a narrative triumph—a stellar example of how to control a seemingly amorphous story even as it keeps fanning out into new and bizarre territory. Desperation just gets completely lost.
[1 stars]
>The 42-year-old actress has a knack for stealing Rescue Me scenes as Denis Leary's troublemaking sister Maggie, a woman who likes men and alcohol. "They certainly push to see how much skin I'll show each episode," laughs O'Neal, who looked to be in great shape in January on Dancing with the Stars. "The more skin I show the better I feel about it. The dancing helped ... but I'm a normal, fortysomething woman! I just want to eat all the time."
>So You Think You Can Dance (FOX, May 25, 8 p.m. ET) Season 2 of the American Idol of feet starts off with auditions. Cat Deeley hosts.
Top Chef (Bravo, May 24, 10 p.m. ET) Lorraine Bracco of The Sopranos helps judge the final dishes. Bon appetit.
The Academy of Country Music Awards (CBS, May 23, 8 p.m. ET) Hosted by Reba McEntire, that firecracker, with performances by American Idol winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood.
Desperate Housewives (ABC, May 21, 9 p.m. ET) For the two-hour season finale, the ghost of Mary Alice Young takes us back into the past, when the girls all met on Wisteria Lane.
24 (FOX, May 22, 8 p.m. ET) The two-hour finale—count how many times Chloe asks her superior, "Why do you want me to do that?" as Jack dodges disaster.
>HE'S MYSTERIOUS Those girls with briefcases don't do it for me. My favorite personality on the hit game show is seen only as a silhouette behind glass above the set. He's the Banker (played by an actor named Peter Abbay).
... TEMPTING AS SIN Howie Mandel is all beaming as host, but the action freezes when the Banker phones him, offering players money to quit. It's the dramatic high point.
... AND A WONDERFUL ROLE MODEL Imagine Simon Cowell sealed off in a glass cage, phoning his judgments to Ryan Seacrest. Chills!
>High School Musical
DVD: This Disney Channel movie became a surprise hit when it aired earlier this year (audience from accumulated broadcasts: 36 million). It's a musical in the old-fashioned sense—happy, silly, tuneful—and so mindlessly innocent it seems like an eighth grader's fantasy of teenage heaven. The star of the basketball team (Zac Efron) and a beautiful academic brainiac (Vanessa Anne Hudgens) want to audition for the school musical, but peer-group pressure threatens to undo their pretty harmonizing. It's hard to resist a show with a number set in a cafeteria and students singing, "Stick to the status quo-whoa-whoa." A summer-vacation sequel is planned. [stars 4]
EXTRAS: Interviews with the stars and director Kenny Ortega (who choreographed Dirty Dancing). Most important, sing-along subtitles. [2.5 stars]
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