‘Harsh Realm’ Makes Murkiness Quite Charming

Choices, choices.

On Friday nights, the toughie is between newcomers facing each other at 9. One is ABC’s previously aired “Now and Again,” the other Fox’s “Harsh Realm,” which is the latest captivating hour from “The X-Files” creator Chris Carter.

“Harsh Realm” is not ready for “The X-Files” deity. Yet it opens impressively tonight, joining “Now and Again” as one of the season’s most promising new series, in contrast to the evening’s other premiere, the creatively bankrupt CBS comedy “Love & Money.”

Carteresque to the bone, “Harsh Realm” is about a somber, bleak, inky universe of virtual reality--seemingly without sunlight--that the military has created inside a potentially deadly computer game. Apparently. Maybe. Who can say?

Trapped there, in any case, is Lt. Thomas Hobbes (Scott Bairstow). He’s a resourceful decorated war veteran who is plucked from relative serenity in California, where he is about to be married, and deployed inside this artificial bubble ruled ruthlessly by an omnipotent militarist named Omar Santiago (Terry O’Quinn). Hobbes has been ordered to find him.

Another prominent player is rival soldier Mike Pinocchio (D.B. Sweeney), with whom Hobbes coexists warily when they are forced to form an alliance against Santiago, whose heavily militarized metropolis of Santiago City is enclosed by an electrified fence that is nearly impossible to pass through.

Hobbes’ sense of isolation is palpable as he is severed from the life he knows, including his fiancee, Sophie (Samantha Mathis). Make that seemingly severed, for fantasy and reality mingle freely in this show, murkiness being part of its great charm.

Unlike pointless, pretentious “Millennium,” his series that followed “The X-Files” into prime time, Carter’s latest venture is seductively mystifying from the moment its dark curtain descends gloomily on its protagonists, stranding them in a culture of high-density combat and danger.

The only disappointment here comes when, after building up Santiago to be some kind of kinky renegade along the lines of Marlon Brando’s insane, despotic Col. Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now,” he turns out to be the unmenacing O’Quinn, who has a commanding officer of his own. The horror.

It’s a small price to pay, though, for an otherwise intriguing hour. “Is this what the world will become?” Hobbes wonders. Friday at 9 is a good place to start.

*

“Love & Money” is as enervating as “Harsh Realm” is energizing.

Think musty and you pretty much have it, this formulaic conflict between the snotty, aimless rich and noble working class playing like something fetched from Miss Havisham’s moldy wedding table in “Great Expectations.”

We meet the characters on the day Allison Conklin (Paget Brewster), a billionaire’s daughter, is to wed a moneyed Princeton man with homes in Manhattan and East Hampton. She wants none of it, though, and is in her wedding gown, locked inside a bathroom in the family’s penthouse at 9:45 a.m., while her bellicose father (David Ogden Stiers) patrols nervously outside and her ever-tipsy mother (Swoosie Kurtz) is already hitting the champagne.

Who should be sent in to unlock the door? None other than the building’s young handyman, Eamon Roach (Brian Van Holt), who, it turns out, is Allison’s old flame. Soon they’re having sex in the shower. And faster than you can say, “The wedding’s off,” it is, the climactic rupture coming in a scene that labors mightily to resurrect Dustin Hoffman liberating Katharine Ross from a future of obsolescence in “The Graduate.”

And the wedding stays off, for in Episode 2, Allison and Eamon have sex in the elevator, and after again clashing with her father over Eamon, she decides to spend the night in the basement rooms he shares with his grating doorman dad (Bryan Doyle-Murray). You might call this in-your-face scheduling, for “Love & Money” airs at kid-friendly 8:30.

Deserving better here is that skilled actress Kurtz. And also Stiers, who has the thankless role of remaining in a perpetual state of harrumph and commenting on his frivolous wife’s “medicated haze,” a condition that’s played entirely for laughs in homage to the great fun that heavy boozing is in real life.

Proving that “Harsh Realm” notwithstanding, “Love & Money” is the night’s premiere heaviest into sci-fi.

* “Love & Money” will be shown tonight at 8:30 on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-DL (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language).

* “Harsh Realm” will be shown tonight at 9 on Fox. The network has rated it TV-14-V (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with a special advisory for violence).