TV REVIEW : ‘Palace Guard’ Derivative and Laughable

Can a former jewel thief and a former B-movie queen be just the ticket to protect the interests of an international hotel chain? In television, yes.

Thus, “Palace Guard,” the ho-hum of a CBS series that premieres as an artificially swollen two-hour movie at 9 tonight on Channels 2 and 8. There are worse ways to spend an evening. And better.

Hereafter, “Palace Guard” will appear at 10 p.m., ultimately following the only new fall series yet to debut, “The Carol Burnett Show.” In fact, this is the kind of derivative television that Burnett herself might have targeted in her spoofing days.

Slippery Tommy Logan (D. W. Moffett), considered by cops in his thieving heyday to be “harder to find than a virgin in Vegas,” emerges from prison to take a job as security chief for swanky Palace Hotels, the same international chain he’d spent his criminal career victimizing.

One catch: Palace public relations chief Christy Cooper (Marcy Walker), a former B-movie actress, distrusts and dislikes Logan. So naturally, Palace magnate Arturo Taft (Tony Lo Bianco) makes her Logan’s supervisor. How else could they bicker and get romantic?

Cooper goes along on Logan’s first assignment, to investigate the death of a woman in Taft’s Acapulco resort and to find Taft’s missing 15-year-old daughter.

That he is somehow able to accomplish both missions on one brief trip--while also fighting with Cooper and rescuing her from a band of bad people--not only saves air fare but also is a credit to the plot acrobatics of executive producer Stephen J. Cannell’s logic-defying script. It concludes in a blaze of sheer absurdity.

When “Palace Guard” does occasionally work, the reason is Moffett (also credible as the TV anchorman with AIDS in a controversial episode of last season’s “Lifestories” on NBC), who performs smoothly in this arena of playful banter.

This dueling character premise--also mimicked on CBS this season by the battling/romancing twosome on “P.S.I. Luv U”--may be overly familiar, but “Palace Guard” is on the cutting edge of network TV’s expanding sleaze, evidenced by an early scene in which Logan is arrested in his shorts by cops who are mightily impressed by a particular element of his anatomy. “I know, I know,” he says. “But please hold your applause.”

With most of “Palace Guard,” no problem.