These Chicago Cops Chase Gargoyles

Not again. Not another series about two cops and a gnome tooling around Chicago in a sporty car while battling horned, winged, stony, carnivorous gargoyles bent on destroying humankind as we know it.

The cops are Nick O’Malley (Michael Landes) and Kate Benson (Alexondra Lee), their larcenous gnome informant is Carl (Danny Woodburn). And the gargoyles menacing the city are so formidable--just imagine if they one day join forces with gossamer fairies--that a special branch of the Chicago Police Department has been created to contain them.

“These things love Chicago. Don’t ask me why. I wish they didn’t,” says the boss, Capt. Richard Page (Richard Gant), whose Dr. Strangelove hand replaces the one shot off in Vietnam.

UPN’s new “Special Unit 2” is almost too campy to be campy. Almost. Title it likable nonsense. How can you not feel warm about a series that opens with TV’s first gargoyle interrogation?

Benson: We’d like to ask you a few questions. Let’s start with name.

Captured gargoyle: I got rights. Don’t I get a phone call?

Darwin obviously miscalculated, for it turns out that gargoyles are the “missing links” in the planet’s evolutionary chain. And instead of being wiped out in the Middle Ages, as you probably thought, they are still among us. At least a few honchos are, abducting tasty Chicagoans to feed a kazillion baby gargoyles that are about to hatch.

As the newly teamed O’Malley and Benson go on a frantic gargoyle egg hunt, you’re thinking this is a nice touch, with Easter Sunday arriving in just a few days.

O’Malley is shoot-’em-up cocky, Benson a real dish who “sees things that no one else does” and none of this is to be taken seriously. Least of all Carl, who is granted some of the hour’s best lines. As when sifting through little piles of stuff left over from a vaporized gargoyle: “I’m a gnome. If it comes from the Earth, I know it.”

As for the creature getting grilled by O’Malley and Benson, you half expect his attorney to be a gargoyle carrying a briefcase. Maybe next week.

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* “Special Unit 2” premieres tonight at 8 on UPN. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children.)