“Higher Ground”: The first regular series from the Fox Family Channel, this troubled-teen drama won’t make you forget all about “Homicide: Life on the Street,” say, or even “Seventh Heaven.” The show, whose second episode runs Friday at 8 p.m., is a look at a kind of fresh-air reform school, Mount Horizon, that uses its wilderness setting and work-camp atmosphere to try to show the kids — multiethnic and way too uniformly good-looking, of course — that drugs and such ain’t all that.
Creaky and obvious most of the time, it is not afraid to embrace such cliches as the glasses-wearing instructor who can’t handle a nature hike; he falls so often you’d think he was experiencing an alternative gravity reality. Joe Lando from “Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman” plays the heart and soul of the school, and he is also one of the producers. Hayden Christensen plays, whinily, the profoundly whiny druggie whose dad and stepmom ship him off to Mount Horizon. People: Why dump your personal problems on the American viewing public?
