Television Reviews : ‘Alive From Off Center’ Is Mostly on Target

“Ready to see something really avant-garde?” Ann Magnuson asks her goose puppet.

“Oh, is it time for ‘thirtysomething’?”

No, you silly goose--it’s time for a new season of “Alive From Off Center,” PBS’ valuable, if uneven, weekly half-hour of modern TV art.

Magnuson, a very funny and inventive New York performance artist, serves as alternate host with photographer-video artist William Wegman. She has puppets; he has a (real) dog. It’s Magnuson’s turn tonight (10 p.m. on Channel 24, 10:30 p.m. on Channel 28), as she briefly and wittily introduces the two segments that make up the season debut.

A splashy resurfacing it is, with an emphasis on colorful zaniness. The two parts are divided between something borrowed--an excerpt from the film “Aria”--and something new--a satire on advertising from some of the people behind “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (though not Pee-wee Herman himself).

“Alive” starts off with the ad satire, and even though the target is too easy the shot is still a funny, dazzling bull’s-eye. Produced and directed by Stephen Oakes of Broadcast Arts, the animation and design-production house originally responsible for the look of Pee-wee’s Saturday-morning show, “Bite and Smile” shoves us down the halls of a surreal firm based, it would seem, on Broadcast Arts itself. Much of the fun in this manic world of make-believe involves some potatoes that closely resemble certain California raisins.

From “Aria,” a film made up of rock-video-like segments set to opera, each directed by a different director, “Alive” has selected the Julien Temple/”Rigoletto” contribution. It has Buck Henry, Beverly D’Angelo, attempted laughs about getting high (on the trendy drug “ecstasy”) and attempted marital farce, plenty of those long traveling shots Temple has used in actual rock videos and his film “Absolute Beginners,” and--by far the most interesting element--the outlandish decor of San Luis Obispo’s Madonna Inn. It’s a daring experiment; it’s also an excruciating failure from start to finish.

Upcoming editions of “Alive” include works by choreographers Michael Clark, Edouard Lock, Timothy Buckley and Blondell Cummings, composer John Zorn and video artist Zbigniew Rybczynski.