Given the culture’s perceived mesmerization by things digital, it’s a wonder there haven’t been more series like “The Net,” which posits a winsome young woman as cyber genius and tries to draw resonance from its belief in the awesome power of the computer.
What is not so wonderful is the program itself, which takes the ill-received 1995 movie starring Sandra Bullock as its starting point but doesn’t seem to venture much further than that entertainment’s idea: Put a gal with a fetching smile, a Gap wardrobe and a hacker’s aptitude on the run for her life.
One of two new dramatic series debuting Sunday on cable’s USA Network (before both move to their regular time periods next Saturday), it at least does not follow the usual USA MO of packing its original series with those veteran television bugaboos, sex and violence.
I use the term “original” advisedly, because, except for the guns and cars being sleeker, USA, in the burgeoning bloc of series it calls “Saturday Night Heat,” has seemed mostly interested in resurrecting late-1970s television.
In addition to the retro fixations on smiting the evil and bedding the lithe, the series’ heroes and villains are Lucite clear, no plot or concept gets too complicated and resolution is mostly achieved weekly.
And indeed, the channel’s other newcomer, a moody, sneakily affecting cop-turned-private eye drama called “Sins of the City” boasts a sex scene that is just barely discreet enough for basic cable six minutes into its first episode. That makes it truer than “The Net” to the USA form established by such criminal-justice shows as the metallically tawdry “La Femme Nikita” (also from the movie), the feather-light “Pacific Blue,” and the video lingerie catalog “Silk Stalkings.”
The only thing remotely cheesecakey in “The Net” is a scene in which star Brooke Langton, from “Swingers” and “Melrose Place,” jogs with her midriff exposed, material hardly more provocative than your average “TGIF” show.
The show instead wants to offer a focal point to all those fears about computers running our lives, privacy being a bad joke and nasty cabals of the smug, self-righteous and impeccably groomed stopping at nothing to make the world run their way.
As with most series based on movies, Sunday’s first episode (8 p.m.) is devoted to retracing, more or less, the plot of the film. Angela Bennett (Langton) is a reasonably content freelance computer consultant onto whose hard drive a secret and damning file lands, inadvertently, she thinks.
Next thing she knows, her true identity has been erased and replaced, she’s been framed for murder and other misdeeds, and she has to live on the lam. Because Angela is emotionally withdrawn and virtually friendless, it falls on her to battle almost solo the conspirators who want to kill her. Her only aide is an on-line guide nicknamed Sorcerer (voiced by Tim Curry), who drops maddeningly (to viewers) enigmatic clues about her predicament.
It’s reasonable fodder for a series: “The Fugitive” brought into the 90s, with a little “X-Files” tossed in. But it isn’t especially smart or complicated in the execution. For every believable bit of jargon like “the T46 has an IRDA interface,” there is a scene such as the one on a bus where Angela has, improbably, an on-line chat via her laptop. Maybe it’s got a wireless modem, but a series that wants to draw a techie audience ought to be more scrupulous about explaining itself. (That goes double for the show’s reliance on voice-recognition software much more adept than anything on the market today.)
The production does create a believable paranoia, with frequent close-ups of Langton’s face emphasizing the horror of this happening to such a cute person.
But the script, at least in Episode One, bogs down in grimace-inducing cliches and theme statements (“computers control our lives . . . electronic information is out there for the taking”). And it fails to establish Angela’s foes, headed by a suave operative played by Joseph Bottoms, as very interesting nemeses.
“The Net’s” closest television analog is a failed Fox series from 1995 called “VR.5.” That, too, featured a lonely young woman with computer smarts and a fear of intimacy due to a missing father, but it functioned on a much deeper emotional level.
Closer to a butterfly net than the Internet in complexity, “The Net” comes off as a less-potent plea for retaining humanistic values amid digital soullessness than it seems to want to be.
More intriguing, even if it is more overtly tawdry, is “Sins of the City.” Australian star Marcus Graham, affecting a decent American accent, is a Miami cop fascinated as much by the process of crime as its punishment. He is forced to quit the force due to his own moral ambiguity in Sunday’s first episode (9 p.m.).
He isn’t cut out to be a cop, anyway, his friends tell him, because of his interest in why criminals sin. So in subsequent episodes he’ll be working as a private eye, with the help of friends still in law enforcement.
There are more rewarding crime dramas on TV, of course, including such shows as “Homicide” and “Law & Order.” But “Sins of the City” finds a kind of tension in its skillfully used tropical setting and its concerns with characters’ motivation, becoming a little more than just the excuse for sheet-mussing, it seems at first glance.
And Graham manages–just–to come off as more magnetic than befuddled with his frequent sultry stares. He has the look, for what it’s worth, of a star in the making.
