ABC (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. ET)
B+
Brian Dennehy is a big guy with a big talent. In his third TV series in three decades (viz Big Shamus, Little Shamus and Star of the Family), he finally gets a role commensurate with his stature. Dennehy plays the head of a psychiatric unit at first a New York, then an Oakland hospital. He gives the hospital administrators fits with his disdain for budgets and procedure. And the good doctor's personal life is something of a mess. Bui he's also a healer with an uncommonly common touch.
The show deftly balances the serious and the comic. Dennehy's patients range from the dangerously deranged to a guy who sits in front of the TV set talking intently into his "special pen," convinced he's prompting Kathie Lee Gifford: "Fix your collar, good.... Ask her about her movie."
The show's prognosis is healthy. Vital signs are good.
NBC (Fridays, 8 p.m. FT)
C+
The creators of this show must have had an easy time pitching il to the network: "It's Knight Rider meets Robocop." 'Nuf said, dudes!
In this futuristic adventure fantasy, Dorian Harewood plays a wheelchair-bound scientist who designs a sleek, high-tech crime-fighting automobile (actually it's a customized Dodge Viper). James McCaffrey plays a career criminal who gels a personality and memory transplant and is installed as the car's driver. But McCaffrey's unsavory past keeps reaching out for him.
Visually and vehicularly, the show is definitely cool. But the plots and characters land firmly on the hackneyed side of the street. Particularly vapid is a weak stab at comic relief in the person of Joe Nipote, who is too full of Bronx cheer as the pushy pasha of the police motor pool.
This is the latest attempt in NBC's sempiternal quest to create a Friday-night testosterone shower of a series. As for its grade, you'd think a program with this much horsepower under the hood would have an easier time passing.
NBC (Tuesdays, 8:30 p.m. ET)
B
This new sitcom employs the genre's now-standard formula: stand-up comic John Caponera plays a husband and father of three kids. The domestic scenes (with Eve Gordon as his wife) could still use some sharpening. But the show begins to hit its stride when it shifts to the work setting, where Caponera is a manager of a lock company, and his foils—buzzcut stand-up Drew Carey as his bizarre office mate and Monty Hoffman as the dough nut-scarfing slob on the loading dock—trade bawdy and boneheaded dialogue.
The early episodes suffer from an awkwardness that the comedy may or may not outgrow. But Caponera is certainly a card, and the scripts, studded with pop culture references from Barney to The Real McCoys, reflect an amusingly askew Lake on modern life. You're not likely to find another show on which a line such as "Buddha frowns on tardiness, does he?" will provoke laughs.
>CRIME TIME AGAIN This is your last chance. NBC is bringing back last year's most provocative show, Homicide: Life on the Street, for four consecutive weeks beginning Thursday (Jan. 6, 10 p.m. ET). Robin Williams guest stars in this week's episode as a tourist who loses his wife when he and his family wander into the wrong part of Baltimore. It's a trenchant hour of TV.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
