Talk About Repeat Offenders

The new ABC series tonight is “Thieves,” and shout if you’ve heard this before.

Two thieves competing for the same diamonds are scooped up by the feds when they botch the heist. Here’s the deal: They’ll avoid jail only if they team up and use their larcenous skills to serve their country by recovering art treasures, underworld secrets, nuclear launch codes and other “valuables” ripped off from the government.

These kids a team? Get outta here.

Johnny (John Stamos) yings, Rita (Melissa George) yangs. Not only do they constantly bicker and battle over everything, but he’s an old-school thief who favors meticulous planning and nonviolence, she’s a high-tech animal who acts instinctively and lives to kick butt. These two kids work as a tandem for the feds? Nah, unless ...

Rita: “We’re stuck together, like it or not.”

Yes, of course they are. Just as their scores of predecessors have been stuck together in this formula for lighthearted drama that movie and TV audiences have been seeing for years.

At its heart is escape, a flight to fantasy where action plus chemistry and snappy dialogue between protagonists are huge and plot barely visible. When wee Rita lays out a 250-pounder with the back of her hand, you know it’s time to pack away disbelief and try enjoying this for what it hopes to be. As it is, gunmen keep missing when blasting away with automatic weapons at point-blank range, the revisionist theory here being that the body travels away from a bullet faster than the bullet travels toward it.

Cloning is not necessarily sinful in TV, where copies of copies of copies occasionally succeed on a creative level (think “Moonlighting,” for example) because they are well-cast and executed with originality.

“Thieves” is not one of those series, largely because of the casting. Stamos has a nice way with light material, but when you look at him you still see the Olsen twins and “Full House.” And George as a cosmopolitan thief? She looks like she’s been around the block, all right. On a bicycle.

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“Thieves” can be seen tonight at 9 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14-LV (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with special advisories for coarse language and violence).