ABC (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. ET)
C
This new series follows the home-and-away exploits of three female rookie cops in Pittsburgh. Jayne Brook (WIOU) plays a married former teacher's aide with a real phobia about violence. (Of course she gets beaten and bloodied on her first shift.) Adrienne-Joi Johnson plays a determined single mom, and Liza Snyder is a glib Desert Storm vet from a family of cops. The trio quickly plunges into a world of senseless acts of crime, violence and neglect. John Terlesky, Tim Thomerson and Deidre O'Connell costar.
The show strives for a Cops-style vérité, posting times on the screen (e.g., 3:51 p.m.) as the trio ride in their squad cars. But the plots also try to blend in personal melodrama and some comedic touches. The mix is unimaginative and uninvolving, although newcomer Snyder is a real find.
CBS (Sun., March 14, 9 p.m. ET)
C+
After a domestic disturbance, a woman is brought to the hospital in a coma, and her husband (Peter Strauss) is charged with attempted murder. But he says he's the victim—that his wife (Judith Light of Who's the Boss?) has been physically abusive for some time. The cops have a lot of trouble buying this story. After all, Strauss is a macho, beer-drinking guy who goes to work in a hard hat.
As Strauss is interrogated, we see his marriage in flashbacks. He walks around his house on eggshells because when Light loses her temper, she's prone to slug him in the face (and she has a pulverizing right cross that Riddick Bowe would envy).
The violence is harrowing, but the psychological profiles are disappointingly superficial. A good cast dignifies what is essentially a specious issue-of-the-week flamer. James Gammon, Stephen Lee, Carroll Baker and Noble Willingham costar.
ABC (Sun., March 14, 9 p.m. ET)
B
A secretary (Susan Dey) who has been doing cocaine all through her pregnancy has a premature baby. The state takes the infant, who was born addicted, and puts her in a dismal county home. Dey must fight her addiction and the authorities to get her child back. Piper Laurie plays Dey's sloppy drunk of a mother, Lorraine Toussaint (Where I Live) plays Dey's social worker, and D.W. Moffett plays her druggie boyfriend, a snake so despicable you keep wishing Judith Light could switch channels for a minute to clobber this guy.
The plot is on the sentimental and simplistic side. But Dey gives a strong performance, proving she's better at drama than she is in her clumsy efforts at comedy on Love & War. Toussaint is also fine as a woman cloaking her compassion behind a veneer of professional callousness.
NBC (Mon., March 15, 9 p.m. ET)
C
Here's a promising TV movie project: Take a number of present and former soap stars (Deidre Hall, Leslie Charleson, Colleen Zenk Pinter, Peter Bergman, Josh Taylor, Michael Zaslow, Kale Browne and Ken Kercheval) and drop them into a plot loaded with the favorite ingredients of the daytime stew: romance, disease, fertility problems, infidelity.
The movie is couched as a mystery. In the opening scene a woman stands on the escarpment of a building 15 floors up, ready to jump. All we see of her is a bracelet on her wrist with a little bell attached. Then the flashbacks begin, and we see three best friends (Hall, Charleson and Zenk Pinter), who all have the same bracelet. So which one ends up on the brink of suicide and why? Lord knows, they all have their trials.
In any event the explication is a perfunctory parlor exercise, slick but bland, comparable to a slow episode of Sisters.
VH-1 (Tues., March 16, 8 p.m. ET)
B+
Back in the '70s, you probably could have gotten pretty long odds if you were willing to bet that Rolling Stone Richards, rock's poster boy for detox decadence, would still be alive, much less making the best music of his career, in 1993. Yet as this chapter of the channel's performance series, taped before an audience at Chicago's WTTW studios proves, that's precisely what has happened.
Richards rips through a smoking four-song set: "Wicked as It Seems," "Gimme Shelter," "Eileen" and "Happy." Why is this British buccaneer sounding so good at 49? Well, we know that it isn't a testament to clean living.
>LENO VS. LETTERMAN
DAVID LETTERMAN IS IN AN ENVIABLE and completely unprecedented situation: Every night on NBC he gets to promote his new show on CBS. For instance, on the night CBS announced it had bought Manhattan's Ed Sullivan Theater to house Letterman's show, Dave devoted his opening remarks and Top 10 List to explaining why he will still broadcast from New York when he changes networks in August. Reason No. 2: "The woman who keeps breaking into my house didn't feel like moving to L.A."
>FROM AFRICA TO ALASKA
THERE IS NOTHING THAT TV DOES better than the nature show, as illustrated by two programs this week. Echo of the Elephants on PBS (Sun., March 14, 8 p.m. ET) details 18 months in the life of a 45-year-old elephant matriarch, Echo, and her extended family. These gray giants exhibit remarkable tenderness and devotion to each other. The following night the Discovery Channel studies the annual cycle of a less sociable species: the grizzly bear. The subjects of The Great Bears of Alaska (9 p.m. ET) emerge from hibernation in the spring, gorge themselves for six months on vegetation, salmon and even cubs of their own kind, then head back into the mountains for the long sleep.
CELINE’S INFERTILITY STRUGGLE: MY PRIVATE HEARTBREAK
Daily injections, painful tests and four failed IVF attempts: The singer, 41, reveal her dreams for a second baby. ‘I’ll try until it works’
