. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "Leaving L.A."
"Gun"
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ABC tries to enliven its Saturday lineup with Keystone Koroners and the life story of a gun. so many shows have died on ABC's Saturday night schedule this season, the programming department should be wearing black armbands. But at least somebody at ABC must still have a sense of humor -- there's no other way to explain the network's latest strategy for its most beleaguered night of the week: Got a death slot? Fill it with shows about death! "Leaving L.A.," which premieres Saturday, is an ensemble drama-with-comedy that's set in the Los Angeles County Coroner's office. Watching Saturday's pilot episode, you can just imagine the producers pitching it to the network honchos: "It's 'ER' in a morgue!" The stiffs keep rolling in, but the employees still find time to play cute practical jokes on each other, eat birthday cake shaped like a homicide chalk outline and attend to personal crises. Jeez, didn't the Simpson trial do enough damage to the L.A. coroner's reputation? The characters on "Leaving L.A." have been done to death (pun intended) on a dozen ensemble dramas before. There's wisecracking coroner's investigator Reed Simms (Christopher Meloni from "NYPD Blue"), who is instantly and one-sidedly attracted to his new partner, the beautiful but intense former LAPD officer Libby Gallante (Melina Kanakaredes, also from "NYPD Blue"). Love/hate alert! Then there's sour, driven medical examiner Dr. Claudia Chan (Lorraine Toussaint), who has a bad 'tude, like Benton from "ER." And erudite, eccentric Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Neil Bernstein (Ron Rifkin), who digs opera, has a full gourmet kitchen in his office and tends a bounteous rooftop vegetable garden. Since this is L.A., there are the inevitable Simpson jokes ("We have a homicide out in Brentwood -- watch out for the flying DNA") and references to the L.A. coroner's star-studded clientele (John Belushi, Marilyn Monroe, Bobby Kennedy). If the show lasts long enough, it might even get around to one of those ripped from-the-headlines "ER"-type episodes: "Cult suicide! Refrigerator truck on the way! Prep the autopsy room, stat!" Death has been a crucial element of many hit shows, like "ER" and "St. Elsewhere," "M*A*S*H" and "China Beach," "NYPD Blue" and "Homicide." ("We speak for the dead," the detectives on "Homicide" are fond of reminding each other.) "Leaving L.A." brings death out front as the focal point, and then doesn't know how to deal with it. Saturday's pilot takes the gauzy New Age approach -- the morgue attendant is a psychic, one of the technicians talks to the bodies as she helps them "cross over," the show is filled with symbolic tunnels and doors and corpse-eye views and fades-to-white and woozy shots where the camera pans heavenward like the operator is having an out-of-body experience. It also lays on the gallows humor, as in, "The dead speak their own language -- stiff-bonics," har-har-har. And, for good measure, it gets all maudlin and "Touched By An Angel" uplifting too ("I never realized that death was so connected to life!"). What's consistent about "Leaving L.A.," though, is its amazing disrespect for the dead. In a recent Hollywood Reporter interview, the show's creator, Nancy Miller ("Profiler"), explained, "I want viewers to come away from this show thinking if anything happened to someone they love, they want these people, or people like them, to take care of the deceased." Now, which characters would she be referring to? The morgue attendant who wears the jewelry of the dead? The photographer who takes arty posed shots of bodies and sells purloined celebrity autopsy pictures? The technicians who do a "Weekend at Bernie's" number as they try to collect a guy who died wearing roller skates? The investigators who poke around in a dead person's apartment and make fun of his hobbies and taste in music? On "Homicide," the dead bodies look mysterious, important; on "Leaving L.A," they're reduced to props. If you thought the Los Angeles firefighters' union put on an impressive show of force to get Fox's cheesy "L.A. Firefighters" drama off the air a couple of seasons ago, just wait until the L.A. County Coroner's office sees this. And they've got scalpels. The second half of ABC's double-header of doom isn't about death per se, but rather about an instrument of death. "Gun," which also premieres Saturday, is a "Twilight Zone"-style dramatic anthology that follows a pearl-handled semiautomatic handgun from owner to owner. Executive producer Robert Altman (in a former life, he worked on the old anthology series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents") has signed up some interesting talent for "Gun," including directors Tim Robbins and Ted Demme and guest stars Randy Quaid, Jennifer Tilly, Martin Sheen, Daniel Stern and Kathy Baker (the latter two appear in the first episode). "Gun" has a provocative premise -- Americans do love their guns -- and a darkly satirical approach. It could turn out to be a good, quirky adult series. But the episode I saw (not the pilot) was a jaw-dropping mess. Written and directed by James Sadwith and starring Rosanna Arquette and Peter Horton, "Columbus Day" went off in a zillion directions, from ham-fisted irony (a bust of gun victim John Lennon is conspicuous in a pawn shop scene) to unintentionally hilarious bored-housewife sex games to a bizarre twist ending. Catch it, by all means, when it airs. It's the most inept, entertaining hour of TV you'll see all season.
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