The Lust Olympics and a ‘Personal’ Trio

“Push,” ABC’s laughably bad new drama series about aspiring Olympians, is “Melrose Place” on a pommel horse.

The young jocks here are pointing to the Games of 2000. But the games driving this series are being played on the San Diego campus of California Southern University, where:

New gymnastic coach Victor Yates (Adam Trese) is again being pursued by his gorgeous assistant coach and former lover, Nikki Lang (Jamie Pressly), a 1996 gold medal-winning gymnast but also a scheming vixen who is fixated on sabotaging lovely freshman gymnast Cara Bradford (Laurie Fortier) because she thinks Victor has an eye for her.

Cara is coming under the sexual spell of her nasty English professor, Bryce Harlan (Paul Kaye), who induces her to write a paper about their relationship that explores “deep beneath the surface of the words.”

Bronze medalist swimmer Scott Trystan (Eddie Mills) fears that he contracted HIV during sex with a girl at freshman orientation, and is afraid to tell his girlfriend, comely swimmer Erin Galway (Maureen Flannigan). This may leave an opening for his roommate, freshman gymnast Tyler Mifflin (Scott Gurney), who also has a thing for Erin.

Snotty Dempsey Easton (Jason Behr), last year’s speediest man on the track team, has turned to dangerous performance-enhancing drugs to fight off the challenge of freshman super-sprinter Milo Reynolds (Jacobi Wynn), and his supplier, the dumpy Gwen Sheridan (Audrey Wasilewski), has the hots for him.

In other words, your ordinary Olympic hopefuls.

You get no sense here of the grueling work and commitment required to become a world-class athlete. If you like camp in which the breakfast of champions is lust, however, this is the heavy-handed series for you, although its appearance at kid-accessible 8 p.m. is boggling.

Everyone here has secrets. The biggest of all is why no one is able to see through the transparently phony Nikki, whose role as assistant gymnastics coach requires her only to skulk in the shadows and push--hence the name for this series--her breasts out.

As for Nikki’s and Cara’s anatomical attributes, if you’re looking for the familiar munchkins who soar as gymnasts, try a Wheaties box.

*

Fox’s new “Getting Personal” is prime time’s latest workplace comedy, the Chicago setting a small commercial production company where Milo (Duane Martin) is a salesman/producer and Sam (Jon Cryer) an editor.

The lives of these bachelors are complicated when Robyn (Vivica A. Fox), with whom Milo had an acrimonious blind date that went bust, becomes his and Sam’s new boss.

This is one of those comedies that is somehow watchable despite the infantile, petulant, jerky behavior of its characters. What works is the cast’s good comedic skills and some of Milo and Sam’s quirky relationship.

Moreover, there is even an occasional laugh, especially in a second episode that finds Robyn persuading her controlling mother in Chicago that she still lives in New York so that she won’t have to spend any time with her.

What doesn’t work is most of the broad humor, the worst coming when Robyn’s former flame bursts into a business meeting she’s chairing to make a spectacle of returning her diaphragm. Say what? And wearing thin, too, is all of that wackiness and seemingly sweetened laughter. Laughter over nothing.

* “Push” premieres at 8 tonight on ABC (Channel 7). The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).

* “Getting Personal” premieres at 8:30 tonight on Fox (Channel 11). The network has rated it TV-PG-D (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for suggestive dialogue).