Good TV Hunting

TV critics are famous for judging hastily. It’s what makes us so lovable.

So welcome to the annual pantheon of impetuous knee-jerk opinion.

To use a baseball metaphor, the very best of the fall television season, which officially begins Monday, has only warning-track power. A few deep flies are noteworthy among these 36 new series, but nothing McGwiresque or Sosan. Nothing that comes even close to leaving the park.

But whiffs? Get out your calculator.

The season appears bottom-heavy with bozos. And these are failures not in quest of something grand or unique or bold--which is always to be respected and saluted, even when achievement doesn’t match ambition--but are efforts in the service of timidity, a case of putting on the green eyeshade and doing business as usual with a quill pen.

It’s known as aggressively, tenaciously playing it safe.

What a goofy strategy to lure back viewers who are spending more and more time with cable or the Internet. Here’s a plan: Let’s knock ‘em on their butts with something beige.

Networks give birth to series as laboriously as sea turtles do their young, and with about as much long-range success. If tradition holds, 80% to 85% of this season’s network hatchlings will live only briefly before getting crunched by the great jaws of low ratings. So if you’re a programmer, why not take your shot and at least fail memorably?

Yet even as their combined audience share continues trickling elsewhere, the big networks maintain their Javert-like pursuit of the ordinary. They seem to prefer this slow, gurgling erosion to granting chunks of prime time to risky, dramatic, breakout TV programs that have the potential to recapture former viewers in a dramatic way. Just as possibly, of course, the result could be a flop--not just one that would disappear without consequence, but a truly spectacular fiasco that would create a sinkhole in the schedule. In other words, a groundbreaking series whose deployment--and this is the great fear--could doom an entire evening should it fail miserably in the Nielsens.

Their problem.

Based on one- or two-episode samplings, meanwhile, news about the new season is hardly all bad. Among newcomers having the most promise, creatively, are the CBS comedies “The King of Queens” and “Maggie Winters,” ABC’s “Fantasy Island” remake (da plane lands again) and possibly UPN’s time-travel drama, “Seven Days.”

Still better, though, are ABC’s workplace comedy “Sports Night,” the WB’s “Felicity” and the CBS hour “To Have & to Hold.”

Inspired by ESPN’s franchise “SportsCenter” and its numerous smirky clones, “Sports Night” is one of those rare comedies (HBO’s recently concluded “The Larry Sanders Show” topping the list) that needn’t be always funny to be appealing. Although its initial episodes are often humorous while monitoring a pair of anchors (Josh Charles and Peter Krause) and “the network” to which they and their producers (Felicity Huffman and Robert Guillaume) reluctantly must answer.

One-liners notwithstanding, it’s these characters’ basic intelligence and responses to a wider life beyond sports that are so attractive and make you care for them immediately, giving this series the potential to be a shrewd observer of human behavior beyond the tight universe of TV. Big laughs would be a bonus.

One of the shows facing “Sports Night” on Tuesdays is the enjoyable drama “Felicity,” which finds a bright, sensitive college freshman (Keri Russell) coming of age in New York with her pals. Let’s call this ABC’s former “My So-Called Life” meets Fox’s “Ally McBeal.” A la Claire Danes and Calista Flockhart in those series, respectively, Russell has That Certain Something that separates her from the crowd and supersedes the written page. Which helps make the pilot of “Felicity” easy to be around.

Script flaws loom large in the initial episode of “To Have & to Hold.” But not as large as the presence of Moira Kelly and Jason Beghe, who click as a soon-to-be-wed couple (she’s a public defender, he’s a police detective) in an Irish Bostonian universe replete with the neighborhood bar and one of those boisterous, big families that typify a number of new dramas this season.

The premiere is at once genuinely moving and witty, and Kelly, especially, is so strong that you tend to turn the other cheek when things get cutesy and surreal in the courtroom.

Nothing is more surreal, though, than the new series on the bottom of the fall food chain. The very worst of these clunkers includes WB’s “The Army Show” and Fox’s “Living in Captivity,” both of which have already premiered. They also include ABC’s “The Secret Lives of Men” and UPN’s “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.” Not secret enough.

But there’s bad, and there’s bad, right?

In the latter luminous category are two comedies designed for the younger set, ABC’s “Two of a Kind” and UPN’s “Guys Like Us.”

“Two of a Kind” finds twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (remember them from ABC’s “Full House”?) playing twins shrewdly named Mary-Kate and Ashley, age 11, who successfully plot to have one of their college-professor father’s (Christopher Sieber) freshman students (Sally Wheeler), with whom he has clashed, hired as their baby-sitter. If that isn’t exotic enough, one of the twins likes makeup and boys, the other sports. Go on, get outta here!

To put it as generously as possible, do not expect “Two of a Kind” to win any Emmys for acting.

But there’s bad, and there’s really, REALLY bad, right? That defines “Guys Like Us,” because, in truth, guys like this exist nowhere else on this planet.

The center of this comedy is Maestro Harrell as a 6-year-old, cleverly named Maestro, who winds up living in the bachelor pad of his elder brother (Bumper Robinson) and the brother’s buffoon of a roommate (Chris Hardwick). Not only does “Guys Like Us” suffer from terminal cute-kid-itis, even worse, little Maestro ends up in the first episode being a sort of pimp for these two guys in their 20s.

Hmmmmmm. I take everything back about this being a timid new season. A first-grader cracking jokes while acting as a procurer? That is unique.