TV Reviews : Fox’s ‘Get a Life!’ Needs to Get a Few More Laughs

Balding 30-year-old paperboys who live at home and act 15, who ridicule their married best friends about having regular jobs and responsibilities, and who then convince them to play hooky from their work and ride roller coasters, will like “Get a Life!”

It’s about them.

Premiering at 8:30 p.m. Sunday on Fox (Channels 11 and 6), “Get a Life” stars Chris Elliott as the above-described man/child Chris Peterson who, in the network’s euphemistic words, “refuses to let the usual stress and anxiety of adulthood enter into his world.”

Put another way, he’s infantile.

The first episode finds him climbing through the bedroom window of his best friend Larry (Sam Robards) early one morning while Larry and his wife (Robin Riker) are still asleep. Then he gets Larry to skip work and accompany him to an amusement park where they kid around and get trapped upside down in a malfunctioning roller coaster.

The message seems to be that life is more fun without the constraints of adulthood. Although there’s a certain devil-may-care appeal in that, the fact is that perpetual children like this protagonist can make it only by transfering day-to-day responsibilities for their survival to others. In this case, the others are parents (Elinor Donahue and Bob Elliott, Chris Elliott’s actual father), who groan about their son’s immaturity but still give him bed and board so that he can bicycle across his paper route free of worry.

If the laughs are there, no harm. However, 30-year-old Ferris Buellers just aren’t very funny. No series with inventive Chris Elliott in it could be all bad, but “Get a Life” comes close.

Wheels of Justice Take a Predictable Path in Fox’s ‘Against the Law’

The fall season affirms that crime looms as large as ever in the minds of TV programmers, and the latest member of the prime-time club premieres at 9:30 p.m. Sunday on Channels 11 and 6.

Fox’s new “Against the Law” (hereafter to air Sundays at 10 p.m.) gives you a mainstream-style unconventional hero in spit-in-your-eye Boston attorney Simon MacHeath (Michael O’Keefe) and a sort of underlit stinking-sewer-of-society look that is atmospheric and full of urban character.

What the slow-moving, 90-minute premiere doesn’t give you is mystery, suspense or a story that you can believe. MacHeath--who comes out a winner despite his near-psychopathic antics in the courtroom--is not that believable either.

He has a loyal assistant, a curt secretary and a slobby investigator. Essentially, though, he is yet another fearless TV attorney who chooses ideals over a silk-stocking law practice, now prefering to expend his efforts mostly in behalf of the underprivileged and unfashionable. On Sunday he champions an emotionally disturbed defendant in a murder case and takes on the divorce case of a mobster’s wife.

Somewhere in the middle of this plodding story, MacHeath faces an ethical crossroads and inevitably does the right thing. Meanwhile, the courtroom conclusion to the murder case is so contrived and utterly preposterous that even Perry Mason would be incredulous.

For a series meant to run against the grain, it’s all very routine.