TV REVIEW : Fresh Premise, Rerun Characters in Video Sitcom

In the annals of really goofy ideas for TV sitcoms, CBS’ offbeat summer series “Wish You Were Here” is bound to rank high. The hook is that the show’s wise-cracking protagonist, who has shot a running video commentary on his extended overseas vacation, is seen only on tape, through the eyes of friends and family back home who get the cassettes in the mail. He’s supposed to be a one-man “America’s Funniest Home Video.”

In tonight’s premiere (at 9:30 on channels 2 and 8), the first tape from laugh-a-second Donny Cogswell arrives in the mail for pert, shallow Janet, his ex-girlfriend. As she watches it on her VCR, Donny--a self-voyeur who likes to shoot everything --tests his new purchase at an electronics store, quits his stockbroker job later that day, gets dumped by Janet still later that day, and flies on a whim to Paris, where he attempts to woo from afar this woman who jilted him so casually.

This is ambitious in concept, and it’s easy to see why it interested such behind-the-scenes movers as executive producers Robert Altman, Marlo Thomas and Kathie Berlin. But however unusual the format, the comic riffs in this episode, at least, are all too familiar. Donny (played by Lew Schneider) is a hyped-up Tom Hanks type. Janet (Leah Lail) is a stuck-up Swoosie Kurtz type. Her new boyfriend, Ted (Michael Mulheren), who stops by and watches a little, is an unctuous-yuppie Jeff Daniels type.

The format also leaves plenty of room for Donny to be a David Letterman type as well, a self-consciously ugly American in Paris who badgers the locals about, among other things, the meaning of amour . But unlike Letterman, his mockery is so manic that it quickly wears you out, leaving you to ask questions like: How does he manage to hold the camera so it’s always trained on his face? How does he do such nimble cross-editing with a single camera? And wasn’t life a lot less narcissistic in the pre-camcorder age?