Two Series Show L.A. in All Its Goofiness

As if U.S. viewers hadn’t had their fill of not only news but also prime-time series about this city, ABC is delivering two new ones that offer an L.A.’s-eye-view of, well, L.A.

“Leaving L.A.” is ABC’s fix on the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, an hour of goofy drama less reminiscent of Jack Klugman in NBC’s old “Quincy, M.E.” than Dr. Irwin L. Golden, who testified as if he were having an out-of-body experience in the preliminary hearing of O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial.

Also set in Los Angeles is “Gun,” a series that traces a handgun through many owners, opening tonight with an empty chamber.

The protagonists of “Leaving L.A.” are veteran investigator Reed Simms (Chris Meloni) and his new partner, Libby Gallante (Melina Kanakaredes), a former LAPD detective who is estranged from her former colleagues and hoping to start anew in the coroner’s office. Also prominent are medical examiner Dr. Claudia Chan (Lorraine Toussaint), lab technician Tiffany Roebuck (Hilary Swank), properties manager Martha Hayes (Anne Haney) and everyone’s boss, chief coroner Dr. Neil Bernstein (Ron Rifkin), who keeps a rooftop veggie garden.

All but Gallante and Chan are real cutups. The question is how receptive viewers will be to a coroner’s office staffed by the Psychic Friends Network. The earnest young Tiffany talks to cadavers (“Why do you have mustard in your ear?”) and Martha senses their vibrations, even when they’re still bagged (“I feel sadness and anger, extreme anger”).

Not only does “Leaving L.A.” fail to cut the mustard, but the series itself is a real stiff, checking out early, and by hour’s end in full rigor mortis. The premiere finds Gallante angering some of her LAPD antagonists by solving a case they botch; a roller skater dying mysteriously; one of Tiffany’s exotic chats paying off; and Reed being the lovable jokester that he is. “Do you ever take anything seriously?” Libby asks.

She learns the answer later when the two of them conclude a rugged day by sitting beside the rooftop veggie garden and philosophizing about the job. Him: “It makes you not wanna stop living.” They’re living?

Meanwhile, Martha is intimately chinning up to the widower of one of her cadavers: “Your wife loved you with all her heart. She wants you to ask out Ethel Burke.”

Keystone coroners . . . and the corpses they talk to.

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As an episodic odyssey of a firearm, “Gun” is a chip off an old concept, its lineage extending at least as far back as “The Gun,” a superior 1974 TV movie that itself appeared to borrow from earlier stories.

The catalyst revolver in the series resides in a pawnshop until stolen by two thugs who use it to rob a mini-mart where actor Harvey Hochfelder (Daniel Stern) and his family have stopped on their way out of town. The family gets swept up in the violence, the incident launching an attempt at black comedy targeting the entertainment industry that is about as bad as television gets, dragging down both Stern and Kathy Baker, who plays the wife.

“Gun” has generated unusual interest because one of its executive producers is Robert Altman. However, the premiere’s satire is a brick that grows heavier and heavier by the minute, devoid of humor and never even approaching the spoofy deftness of Altman’s film “The Player” or “Network,” the other entertainment-biz parody it tries to emulate.

Another episode offered for review is more serious, making the same gun pivotal in the violent resolution of a romantic triangle. But the characters are uninteresting, the climax loony and the entire story plodding and utterly hapless.

What Harvey tells his wife in the premiere applies to both ammo-less episodes: “This is ridiculous.”

* “Leaving L.A.” airs tonight at 9, with “Gun” following at 10, on ABC.