Karen Sisco': Putting The Pow in Empowerment By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 1, 2003; Page C01
This is shaping up as the season of the macho babe -- on "Cold Case," "Threat Matrix," returning shows such as "Alias" and, as of tonight, "Karen Sisco," an ABC crime drama based on an Elmore Leonard character from the novel and movie "Out of Sight." Jennifer Lopez played her on the big screen; Carla Gugino plays her on the small one, though it seems less small with Gugino on it.
Hers is an essentially ingratiating performance, hard as steel maybe but not as cold, and the show has its own distinctive oomph. In the premiere, at 10 tonight on Channel 7, we meet Sisco during one of her assignments as a U.S. marshal stationed in Miami. As it happens, she gets snookered by a cagey crook who escapes her grasp, leading to the tediously inevitable chewing-out from the tiringly trite blustering boss back at headquarters.
Do the bosses always have to bluster on these shows? It's one of the hoariest cliches around, and yet nobody ever shows any shame about doing it one more time. Actor Bill Duke, saddled with the role, deserves so much better.
Like the heroine of "Alias," Ms. Sisco has a daddy nearby to offer counsel or wry remarks. As played by Robert Forster, this dad likes to hang around with shady characters and play poker with ex-cons. Definitely sunny rather than shady, Peter Horton saunters back into series television as one of Sisco's exes. Horton doesn't look a day older than he did on "thirtysomething" -- maybe an hour or two older, but that's it.
But Sisco can resist his Nordic charm: "You can't just come by every time you decide to leave your wife," she barks, sending him into sheepish retreat. Sisco is, not surprisingly, independent and self-sufficient and all the other things we expect of the modern macho heroine. Tangle with her at your own risk; in the second half of the show, she wins a fight with a big, bald mobster. All in a day's work.
Written by Jason Smilovic and directed by Michael Dinner, the series premiere definitely has an Elmore Leonard swagger to it, and many of the decorative touches and character details seem richer and more enticingly eccentric than those of most crime shows. This is no run-of-the-mill production, but it falls under the heading of "acquired taste." The main inducement to acquire it is to watch Gugino have her way with the title role.
Actually, "Carla Gugino" might have made a better title than "Karen Sisco"; it sounds more formidable somehow. But this can be taken as evidence that Gugino is well suited to the part and vice versa. It's always a kick when that happens, and "Karen Sisco" turns out to be a kick and a half.
'It's All Relative'
"It's All Relative," a ghastly mess of a sitcom premiering tonight on ABC, represents a big step down for producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, previously best known for spectacular and sophisticated movies and specials. It's a step down for slumming viewers, too, and even a step down for ABC.
The gimmick here, as revealed in the premiere at 8:30 on Channel 7, is a new kind of mixed marriage. A young man named Bobby (Reid Scott) wants to announce his engagement to a young woman named Liz (Maggie Lawson), but they're both aware of certain incompatibility problems with their two families.
Bobby's father is a bullying, bellowing conservative Irish Catholic bartender. Liz, meanwhile, has not one daddy but two; she was reared by a pair of gay men.
Well you can imagine the sparks that fly. And imagining them should be enough, because watching them is painful and grating, like a game of dueling fingernails on matching blackboards. Lenny Clarke as Bobby's father roars and brays and threatens to set a sitcom record for getting on your nerves even before the first commercial.
The writers have avoided making the gay daddies politically correct insofar as having them be a perfectly well-adjusted couple. In fact, when you get right down to it, they're a pretty insufferable pair of smug snobs. John Benjamin Hickey and Christopher Sieber, who play them, seem determined to prove that gay men can be colorlessly dull, too. They're perhaps the first gay men on television to be in need of a visit from those "Queer Eye" cut-ups.
Anti-gay insults from Bobby's dad get pretty nasty, bringing back to prime time terms such as "homos," "pansies," "froot loops," "fags" and so on. At one point the bellicose father threatens one of the two dads with "I'll kick your butt all the way back to fairyland." If the show were making any sort of contribution to domestic tranquillity, use of such words might be justified, but the half-hour just comes off as cheap, nasty and embarrassing.
"It's All Relative" has the trappings of a throwback, and the sooner it's thrown back, the better.
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