TV REVIEW : Cheeky ‘Legend’ Just a Belabored Endeavor

“Print the legend” went the maxim that John Ford memorialized. Perhaps literally taking off from that famous advice, “Legend,” a cheeky new Western series from UPN, starts off by making some hay of Old West cliches and then, with a wink, quickly embraces them.

As a shoot-’em-up celebration of falsehoods, the show may be too cynical for young kids, and isn’t nearly cynical enough for grown-ups.

Richard Dean Anderson stars in the dualistic title role as Ernest Pratt, an initially boozy dime novelist at the turn of the century who frequently gets mistaken for the protagonist of his Western adventure books, Nicodemus Legend. Such mistaken assumptions occur because Pratt uses his own likeness on the jackets and untamed America is presumably packed with dullards who can’t distinguish fantasy.

Eventually, faced with a town in need of saving from land grabs and railroad schemes, he’s pressed to impersonate the fictional hero everyone assumes him to be. (Think “Three Amigos.”)

As if one high concept weren’t enough, Pratt has some help in assuming the larger-than-life identity: A neighbor, John de Lancie’s European-expatriate scientist, happens to be Tom Edison’s chief rival as inventor extraordinaire, and it’s this eccentric who cheerfully sets up the writer hero with stun guns, bullet shields and other futuristic contraptions to combat frontier bullies. (Shades of “Back to the Future III.”)

Tonight’s belabored two-hour premiere lets Anderson get off a few good, grumpy lines on his reluctant way to Western sainthood. And the script by Michael Piller and Bill Dial (who executive-produced with Anderson) has at least one inspired scene, when Legend fights off the hired gun who has come to town to kill him, not with brawn but by modestly proposing loaning him his agent for a book deal.

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Mostly, though, the spoofery rarely rises above a certain level of lame foreshadowing humor (“No self-respecting young boy would be caught dead in a coonskin cap,” the hero posits), and the perfunctory fantasy action and a not-so-deeply felt earnestness supplant any waning satire. Much as the mix of action, humor and scientific anachronisms might recall a certain ‘60s series, this one is the mild, mild West.

* “Legend” premieres at 8 tonight on KCOP-TV Channel 13.