BY TOM GLIATTO
COMEDY
After playing a psychiatrist in a guest role on NBC's Scrubs, Heather Graham gets her own sitcom on ABC with Emily's Reasons Why Not. Yes, well, why not, you know? Playing a self-help book editor in search of love, she's obviously a capable comic actress, even if she does tend to keep hitting the same note of wide-eyed enthusiasm, as if she'd just flung open her closet and discovered it unexpectedly restocked with an entire rack of next season's couture. The upside is that Graham is just about as translucently beautiful an actress ever to glow within a television set. So blonde, so delicate, so lemony fresh. Sometimes she looks like a Tinkerbell nightstand lamp.
Judging from the pilot episode, though, Emily's Reasons needs work. It's yet another Sex and the City derivative, and like most if not all Sex derivatives it doesn't have the original's charm, namely the vertiginous exhilaration that comes of being young, thoughtless and racing down big city streets in high heels. Whee! As Emily narrates the week's misadventure, she enumerates the warning signs of romantic hazards that, of course, she's doomed to trip over anyway. In the premiere she's afraid the office colleague she spent the night with may be gay (clues: he only wants to cuddle, and in the morning he leaves the sheets streaked with his fake-tan bronzer). It's mindless, it's trite. Graham is imperviously gorgeous throughout.
