You could have built one of TV’s better cable channels by tossing life preservers to the good drama series ABC has thrown overboard after a season or less in recent years. “My So-Called Life,” “Relativity,” the just-canceled “Cupid” and “Nothing Sacred” were innovative and intelligent, as was “Maximum Bob,” the Elmore Leonard-based show that had a cup of coffee on the schedule last summer, was pronounced ready to stick around by everybody except ABC executives, and hasn’t been seen since.
With more limited ambitions, even the hourlong programs “Vengeance Unlimited” and the movie spinoff “Dangerous Minds” were also effective television — and also were pulled from the ABC schedule after what is beginning to seem more like a mandatory waiting period than a real chance at life.
The only drama ABC has had the good fortune, the patience and the common sense to make into a hit in those years has been the David E. Kelley lawyer hour “The Practice.” It debuted two years ago in March, taking the place of “NYPD Blue” to allow “Blue” to save original episodes for the May sweeps.
This month, ABC tries that strategy again with “Strange World,” a dark and moody hour from “The X-Files” veteran Howard Gordon that will take “NYPD Blue’s” 9 p.m. Tuesday spot starting Tuesday after debuting Monday (9 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7).
Based on the two episodes I have seen, lightning will not strike twice, yet the above list of quality failures will not be growing longer. The show will fail because, unusual for ABC, it deserves to fail.
The tale of Paul Turner, a critically ill ex-Army captain tapped by a military agency to investigate “criminal abuses of science” — illegal cloning, for example, and organ transplant monkeyshines — “Strange World” is so intent on creating a murky atmosphere it forgets that while audiences may admire the realistic rendering of a swamp, they don’t necessarily want to spend a whole hour in it.
Executive producer, co-creator and a writer, Gordon is evidently intelligent and thoughtful, and he moves a story rapidly and squeezes a feature-film look out of a TV-series budget.
Also strong are his lead actors, gaunt, ashen Tim Guinee as the raging humanist Turner and, especially, the Uma Thurman-like Kristin Lehman as his partner in love and crime fighting, a doctor named Sydney. And somewhere in “Strange World” is a fresh idea, phrased in the first episode as a question by Paul Turner: “Why are people more afraid of aliens from outer space than the monsters we’re creating ourselves?”
But as sexy as the concept might have sounded on paper — or in the paper, where the plots seem to come from — a decision and ability to dramatize debates in medical ethics does not equal good drama. Gordon and the show get too tangled up in their plot twists.
The two episodes ABC made available both cast fertility doctors in black hats for tinkering with embryos and women’s wombs. We can anticipate manmade viruses and, probably, replicant sheep and irradiated vegetables joining the list before “Strange World” ends its six-episode run. These are potentially provocative topics, and, Einstein knows, a culture where more people believe in UFOs and angels than understand how electricity works could use some intelligent discussion of science.
But Gordon insists on making it overly complicated. In Episode 1, there is a lot of distracting business about Guinee’s immune-system illness and the top-secret, life-saving drug doled out to him like truffles, apparently by an underground government agency that has a cryptic plan for him.
His contact is a mysterious, dominatrix-style operative in skin-tight leatherwho keeps telling him he might lose his supply of the drug if he doesn’t stop being a bad boy. To say this gets in the way of the story is like saying the central “X-Files” conspiracy got a little bloated.
Even when “Strange World’s” side story stays more in the background, as in Tuesday’s second episode, the series has a tone as unremittingly serious as one of Turner’s frequent lectures to wayward scientists. Like him, the show begins to take on a hectoring tone.
Mock and roll: More good work arrives Monday from VH1, whose winningly trashy “Behind the Music” biography series has become a hit and the definitive way to answer, for instance, that nagging question about whether it was cocaine, heroin or the weight of his own hair that brought Leif Garrett down.
Now comes another new series that ought to help keep more people tuned to the channel for longer than the time it takes to find out whether they are interested in the next music video. It’s called “Rock Candy.”
In its first outing, the half-hour weekly newsmagazine (9:30 p.m.) uses hidden cameras to find out how desperately applicants want an advertised job as personal assistant to a “big-name rock star,” and it subjects famous musicians’ paintings to the scrutiny of art experts. (Sorry, Tony Bennett.)
These ideas do not, alas, end up quite as funny in the execution as they are in concept. But the show is still sharper, and more daring than most of the things that wind up on TV about the rock business or personages.
And the first episode’s Gumby music video, created using scenes from the clay boy’s oeuvre and the lyrics to the Natalie Imbruglia tune “Torn,” verges on pop-culture genius. You’ll want to tape and pass it around.
