TV REVIEWS : ‘Viper’ Traveling Down a Rocky Road

“Knight Rider,” move over.

NBC rolls out its version of demolition derby at 9 p.m. Sunday with a two-hour premiere of “Viper,” a series about yet another crime-fighting sports car and “the three-man vigilante team behind it.” This clunker’s regular time slot, on Channels 4, 36 and 39, is 8 p.m. Fridays.

Viper is a high-tech, gizmo-glitzed car created by a paraplegic genius named Julian Wilkes (Dorian Harewood) who gets to sit in front of computer screens saying things like, “I’m reading armor-panel breakdown.” The best thing about the premiere is that his disability goes unmentioned.

The Viper’s “wheelman”--or driver, to the unhip--is Joe Astor (James McCaffrey), a career criminal who surgically has been given amnesia and transformed into a good guy on the orders of officials of a city being terrorized by a crime syndicate known as the Outfit. Despite his felonious pedigree, Joe is deep, real deep. Before finding the big boss of the Outfit, Joe remarks pensively, he has to find someone else: “Myself.”

If that isn’t funny enough for you, No. 3 in the Viper troika is a laughman, motorpool specialist Frankie Waters (Joe Nipote), who talks like, hey, y’know, his speech coach is Kirk, the Jere Burns character in NBC’s late “Dear John.”

Tire-squealing clashes between Viper and the Outfit--which devilishly plans to hijack plague anti-toxin and hold it for ransom--are mindlessly violent, to say nothing of awesomely inane.

The best is when the Outfit’s low-life operatives peel away from their evil deeds in four matching black sports cars. That way the cops couldn’t possibly spot them.

Written by series creators Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson (“The Flash”), the script gives Joe a love interest (Sydney Walsh) while favoring technology over humanity.

Even though the Viper’s unspectacular special effects are basically upgraded James Bond or modified Batmobile, the car looks sturdier than the series.