TV REVIEWS : It’s All in the Timing

Another weekend, another set of new series.

The newcomers this time are dramas: ABC’s “Men,” at 10 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, and NBC’s “Quantum Leap,” which gets a two-hour introduction at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39, and then moves into its regular 9 p.m. slot on Friday.

The premise for “Quantum Leap” is proven and ever appealing. Only the execution remains a question.

“Quantum Leap” aspires to be “The Time Machine,” “Twilight Zone” and “Back to the Future” rolled into one. A malfunctioning scientific experiment sends Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) bounding back in time through his own life span, intermittently accompanied by an holographic observer named Albert (Dean Stockwell).

In the two-hour premiere, Beckett awakens in the body of an Air Force test pilot in 1956 and faces an immediate crisis because he doesn’t know how to fly. He’ll make two other time stops before the final commercial, allowing us to use his experiences to chart our own lives.

As written by executive producer Donald P. Bellisario, “Quantum Leap” for the most part is so excruciatingly slow and laborious that you wonder if director David Hemmings was trapped in his own time warp. Yet Bakula does nicely, and the story ultimately accelerates and even yields some very affecting moments as Beckett intrudes on his own past.

Freed of the burden of filling two hours, “Quantum Leap” may work better and surely will move faster as a weekly series. It is amazing that a show about time, however, would have no concept of it.

“Men,” meanwhile, makes a sort of quantum leap from “thirtysomething” to malesomething--very promisingly throughout much of tonight’s premiere, only to disintegrate next Saturday. After Episode One, you want to know more about the mid-to-late 30-ish characters in “Men.” After Episode Two, you want to know less.

Although the filming is in Toronto, the setting is supposedly Baltimore, where Steven the bachelor surgeon (Ted Wass), Paul the divorced newspaper columnist (Saul Rubinek), Charlie the married lawyer (Ving Rhames and Danny the single cop (Tom O’Brien) are old buddies who hang out and have weekly poker games together.

The death of Danny’s older brother, who is also a member of the group, has a traumatic effect on the men, feeding already existing tensions between Danny and Charlie and intensifying the relationships among the characters.

Written by co-executive producer Steve Brown and directed by co-executive producer Peter Werner, this is very compelling work--stylish, textured and interesting--buoyed by nice performances all around. That the story’s tensions are too easily resolved, however, is unfortunately an omen of what awaits in next Saturday’s hour, when “Men” softens its edges in a twist toward silly farce.

This will be one of those series with no memory, apparently. No longer the grieving, angry young man of Episode One, Danny next week is a sort of comic pit stop, exceeded in buffoonery only by the clowning Paul (this character is really hard to take), who has the hots for the mother of the runaway who has the hots for Steven. Got it?

The women are all trivial, but so are the men. The result is a clumsy rendition of the kind of breezy, romping nonsense that “Moonlighting” used to pull off so deftly. Some of the style is there, but the characters aren’t worthy of it.