Dropping the Cubs to stake your fortunes on the WB network at first seems like getting rid of avocado-colored kitchen appliances to replace them with mustard yellow. Neither has exactly defined the cutting edge in television viewing.
The Cubs’ problem is the perennially pitiable nature of the baseball team, combined with the inherent general dullness of televised baseball. Games and moments have interest, of course, but 162 games at 3 hours and more per, and with a mediocre team to boot, can seem like an extended session in the dentist’s chair, even to an inveterate TV-sports junkie.
And the WB, though it is certainly improving — and showing signs of doing better in Chicago than in other places — is still struggling to find its way as a television programming service. Further evidence of the struggle arrives Monday night in the new WB series “Three” (8 p.m., WGN-Ch. 9).
Rather than Sammy Sosa’s propensity for striking out, the title refers to a trio of fetching young crime solvers in a show that blends some of the less interesting ideas from “Mission: Impossible” and “Charlie’s Angels” with senselessly showy filmmaking techniques. (A big moment at the end of tonight’s Episode 1 comes when we watch one of the trio wipe his hand across his mouth in slow motion. Next week: ear scratching.)
The Cubs-for-WB swap was, in essence, effected by WGN-TV last week. The station said it would break longstanding tradition this baseball season by moving a passel of Cubs games, especially ones that occur on the WB’s Monday and Tuesday nights, over to cable’s CLTV, a sister station that falls, like this newspaper, under the Tribune Co. corporate umbrella. WGN’s Cub schedule will drop from 139 games last year to 92 this year.
The decision has proven controversial on local sports radio, which is a little like saying Lake Michigan has proven wet. But it has also sparked interest and ire across the country, as people who have grown used to following the Cubs via WGN’s cable superstation presence fire off e-mails of outrage. Never mind the rest of the nation, the ostensible all-news channel CLTV — which will get some 62 games — isn’t even available on all Chicago cable systems.
(And the display of 62 baseball games, 50 more than last year, does call into question CLTV’s devotion to its all-news mission. You don’t, after all, see CNN picking up stray Atlanta Braves telecasts.)
Meanwhile, Cubs announcer/mascot Harry Caray, whose collection of quirks and tics has turned from exasperating into lovable and become perhaps the last, best reason to watch the Cubs in recent years, has been outspoken. His polite challenge to the decision is to claim that he is better looking than Buffy, the vampire-killing lead character in one of the Tuesday night WB shows.
He is wrong, of course, although he is better looking than several of the vampires.
But he misses the common sense of WGN executives, who are struggling to balance a heavy sports load with the emerging network and who realize they have something special on their hands in the twin teen-angst series “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and the new “Dawson’s Creek” on Tuesday nights. Both have proven far more popular than the average Cubs game.
The suits are doing what seems to have the greatest long-term potential for the station and for the WB, of which Tribune Co. owns a 22-percent piece and which needs a strong showing in the country’s third-largest city to be able to truly say it has arrived.
It was precisely such trademark programming — high quality and unavailable elsewhere — that helped build the upstart Fox network earlier this decade. (Of course, “Married . . . with Children” also helped build Fox, and WB has its shameless “Married” knock off, in “Unhappily Ever After” on Sunday nights, but that’s another, and sadder, story.)
Monday nights, though, the trade off seems less logical. The treacly-but-not-intolerable family drama “7th Heaven” seems entrenched at 7 p.m. and might be more potent with the right partner series. But “Three,” which seems targeted at teenage boys who don’t do a lot of reading, does not seem to be that partner.
It posits three attractive young criminals who are blackmailed into doing the dirty work of a covert “mix of government and business interests,” to quote the young trio’s overseer.
This fellow (David Warner) plays Charlie to their Angels, sending them off to nail the folks the government can’t reach through conventional methods. We get just enough of their life stories to give them two dimensions — the woman (Julie Bowen) was even sexually abused as a child, a tidbit that has rapidly become the prime storytelling cliche about female characters.
The three have to work together or go to jail, a premise with some promise. But in the premiere the banter lacks wit, the action lacks tension, and the emotional moments lack humanity. Most of what it has going for it are the appealing cast and that slick, and ultimately hollow, camerawork.
And if you need oily and hollow camerawork, you can find that aplenty in Cubs telecasts, laden with gratuitous shots of attractive women in the crowd. All things considered, I’ll take Sammy Sosa striking out three times, the Cubs losing by three runs — and Harry Caray mispronouncing, by three syllables, the name of the opposing team’s Venezuelan reliever — over this version of “Three.”
