A couple that runs a Maine redemption center and a Massachusetts man were indicted this week for allegedly redeeming beverage containers in Maine that were bought in other states.

Thomas and Megan Woodard, who run Green Bee Redemption in Kittery, face the more serious charge of allegedly passing off more than 100,000 out-of-state containers — with a value of more than $10,000 — as if they had been purchased in Maine.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

An estimated 90 million cans and bottles are fraudulently cashed in each year in Maine, costing beverage distributors $8 million to $10 million, said Newell Augur, executive director of the Maine Beverage Association.

People from other states — especially New Hampshire, which has no “bottle law” — routinely redeem loads of cans and bottles in Maine, Augur said. Redemption centers pay customers 5-cent refunds on most beverage containers and 15 cents for wine and liquor bottles. The centers, in turn, get that money back from distributors, plus a 3 1/2- or 4-cent handling fee per container.

In the 1996 “Seinfeld” episode, Kramer and Newman hatch a plan to drive a truckload of cans and bottles to Michigan, because the redemption fee there was 10 cents, double New York’s nickel deposit.

Kramer laments it can’t be done. “You overload your inventory and you blow your margins on gasoline,” he says at one point. But Newman offers up free space in a mail truck he has to drive to Michigan before Mother’s Day — “the mother of all mail days,” he calls it — and the pair head off. (They end up aborting the trip while chasing down Jerry’s stolen Saab.)

“That was a very funny episode,” Augur recalls. “But this is not a laughing matter.”

Officials estimate that up to 1 billion beverage containers are sold in Maine each year. Containers sold in other states, however, carry the Maine deposit stamp because it’s not cost-effective to change labeling for each state.

The redemption rate — and the instances of fraud — have gone up with the poor economy, Augur said.

In all, 10 states have redemption laws, but Maine is susceptible to fraud because it has expanded its 1978 bottle-deposit law through the years beyond soda, beer and other carbonated beverages. It now accepts juice, water, sports drinks, liquor and other containers.

Neighboring New Hampshire doesn’t have any redemption law. In Massachusetts, redemptions are limited to beer, carbonated soft drinks and mineral waters.

Distributors say redemption fraud is most prevalent along Maine’s border with New Hampshire.

In 2003, the owner of redemption centers in the border towns of South Berwick and Kittery paid a $10,000 fine following a state crackdown on redemption fraud, but Assistant Attorney General Leanne Robbin said this week’s indictments were the first criminal charges she’s aware of in a redemption case in Maine.

The Woodards did not return a call to their home seeking comment.

They are accused of knowingly accepting containers at their redemption center that were purchased in another state, and therefore not eligible for a refund in Maine, and then selling them to distributors for the combined handling and redemption fees.

Peter Prybot, a 62-year-old lobsterman and writer from Gloucester, Mass., denied the allegations in the indictment, which charges him with redeeming more than $1,000 of empty containers in Maine that weren’t eligible to be redeemed.

Prybot said he accumulated cans and bottles during road trips to Maine and later cashed them, but said they all came from Maine.

Augur said legislation has been introduced that could help alleviate the problem by allowing distributors to sue individuals they believe are illegally redeeming large numbers of containers in Maine.

 For Newman and Kramer, their beautiful scheme was doomed from the start:

That pretty much describes Kelley’s latest, “Harry’s Law” (Mondays, 10 p.m./9  Central). It’s about Harriet “Harry” Korn (Kathy Bates), a burned-out Cincinnati patent attorney who gets fired for smoking pot in her office, then gets hit by a young man named Malcolm (Aml Ameen) after he jumps off a roof, and then is released from the hospital only to be hit by a car driven by a hot shot young attorney named Adam Branch (Nathan Cordry), then joins forces with both of them and some other characters and takes over a shoe store in a rundown neighborhood and turns it into a law firm that seems to handle every kind of civil and criminal case. But because this is a Kelley series, Harry and her staff continue to sell shoes. There’s a high-heeled shoe in the series’ logo. I know — cute, right?

The moment in tonight’s episode where one of Harry’s staff shows up with a sandwich board that promises a legal defense and women’s shoes is cute, too, as is the line about how the shoes are on consignment. Kelley’s shows are always very, very cute, often greeting-card cute, until they suddenly turn grotesque or sleazy or gratuitously stupid (remember what happened to George Vogelman on “The Practice”?) or toss in some antiquated ethnic stereotype (like the no-tickee, no-shirtee Chinese laundromat guy who accosts the heroine at the start of tonight’s episode of “Harry’s Law” and sets a subplot about China’s one-child reproductive policy in motion) or  suddenly start lecturing you about gun control or workplace harassment or immigration or abortion or something, as if a mediocre episode of “Seinfeld” had suddenly decided to rally by turning into “Twelve Angry Men.”

I think it would be best for everyone involved — especially the audience — if “Harry’s Law” were quickly canceled. It’s not as bad as some recent Kelley series (“The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire,” to name one). But  judging from the pilot and tonight’s first regular episode, it’s got all the David E. Kelley tics and tricks that make me want to drink lye, but none of the energy and confidence that often make Kelley’s series watchable anyway. My favorite Kelley show was his “Practice” spinoff, “Boston Legal,” because for long stretches it seemed to slough off the bonds of reality altogether and become a strange comic soft-shoe between William Shatner and James Spader, two of the most authentically bizarre actors ever paired as co-leads in a long-running TV program; but even if “Harry’s Law” decided to go in a “Boston Legal” direction, I doubt the show could pull it off, because it’s so half-assed. It looks awful, too, with its utterly undistinguished cinematography and blocking and “Hey, look, we’re on the same generic urban backlot every NBC show uses!” settings, and the blown-out windows looming behind people’s shoulders as if they’re on a reality TV series. I don’t think the show is smart enough to be doing any of this stuff for a reason; more likely either Kelley or NBC is a cheap bastard. At times it feels as though Harry is a coded stand-in for Kelley himself, a legendary figure who’s bored with his job and has run out of ideas and inspiration, but who needs to stay in the game because he doesn’t know what else to do.

But the more pressing problem with the show is that Bates, so often a hilarious and surprising actress, can’t seem to find to find a way into this character. Supposedly the title role was intended for a man until Bates read the pilot script and took a liking to it. If you picture Harry’s predicaments and dialogue on the page, then imagine Shatner or Spader in “Boston Legal” mode doing and saying the same things as Bates, you can almost envision a watchable series. The problem isn’t the gender swap, it’s that Bates’ energy is wrong. She seems to be playing Harry as a real person rather than a David E. Kelley kook. Watch how she interacts with one of her clients, the 87-year old African-American grandmother (Irma P. Hall) who’s being tried for sticking up a convenience store because she would have starved otherwise. Harry’s embittered bluster dissolves almost immediately, and she begins responding to the woman’s plight on a human level, and the score signals Harry’s thaw by tinkling in our ear. Bates, who does over-the-top very well (“Misery,” “Primary Colors”), can’t help reaching out to the client, and responding naturally, as most functioning people would. That’s fine, but it doesn’t match up with the woman we saw earlier in the episode who responded to the staff’s sighting of a rat in the shoe store/law office by pulling a pistol and blowing the rodent away.

The rat scene and the scenes between Harry and the stickup granny encapsulate the show’s problems. Apparently this isn’t just the kind of series where the lead character packs heat and uses the gun to casually blow away vermin in her workspace; it’s the kind of series where the rest of the staff reacts to random, stupid, incredibly dangerous gunfire in their office by sort of shrugging and then carrying on with their business. That’s all fine — it would even be funny if the timing were sharper and the tone more vigorous — but when “Harry’s Law” suddenly becomes a finger-wagger about the neglect of elderly people of color and the cruelties of the post-capitalist economy, and Kelley hasn’t bothered to smooth the shift between those wildly different modes, and if the star is overdoing the earnestness and fellow-feeling and neglecting to make the main character hard and unpredictable and nutty, there’s really no way that the series can ever work.

Interestingly, Irma P. Hall, who played the matriarch in “Soul Food” and the righteous widow in the Coen brothers’ remake of “The Ladykillers,” comes closer to selling this unwieldy work-in-progress than any of the regular cast members. She’s an old movie-style actress, always sharp as a tack, always playing the character and seemingly not giving a damn what you think of her. I am tempted to argue that if you put an actress like Hall in a series like this one, you might have something. But I don’t want to give Kelley any encouragement.

The behind-the-scenes bits from the reunion plot have proven entertaining all season, particularly when they didn’t involve some tiff with Larry David that we’ve seen a million times before. Larry’s spat with Julia Louis-Dreyfus over water stains on her antiques fell into repetitive territory, of course. (And how many times can Suzie call Larry an asshole and throw him out of her house?)

Having said that, the running lines “Do you respect wood?” and Jerry’s bit about the absurdity of the segue “Having said that …” both captured that distinctly Seinfeldian flair we all know and miss so desperately. The scene where Larry and Jerry marvel over Jason Alexander’s pretentious vanity book “Acting Without Acting” demonstrated the more nuanced and (somewhat paradoxically) more punch line-driven tone that comes from Jerry’s comic stylings and Jason’s, well, acting without acting, getting thrown into the mix.

In fact, the reunion-focused episodes of “Curb” this season have demonstrated just how funny this show could be if its writers relied more on relatable observations of modern behavior (constant texting by young kids, the vanity of actors) and less on gripes about tipping, personal favors and perceived insults (angry waiters, angry maitre d’s, angry coffee guys) that lead to the shouting matches. Even the predictable setup of Jason borrowing Larry’s pen last week paid off in spades when Jerry heard about Jason’s indiscretions with the pen, shook his head and told Larry, “You don’t lend Jason anything, anything that can be … inserted.”

On last week’s episode, when several characters reacted to Larry’s scatological reference to a kid’s rash with stunned silence, culminating in a doctor leaving the room with Larry and quietly instructing his nurse to call the cops, we got a glimpse of how a little restraint allows the show’s humor to shine through. Larry was being a jerk, as usual, but the reactions were subtle and the situation was at least somewhat familiar. (I particularly loved the scene where we glimpse Larry texting to his young fan, “NO I DON’T WATCH WIZARDS OF WAVERLY PLACE, I’M AN ADULT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”)

But even after last week’s surprisingly strong episode, the finale didn’t disappoint, from Larry’s jealousy over the smug camaraderie between Cheryl and Jason to his larger-than-life imitation of George. The best scene, though, had to be this classic diner exchange between Jerry and George, after George’s estranged wife Amanda is gone for good.

George: Well, I’ll never meet anyone else again.

Jerry: Probably not.

George: Meeting is hard.

Jerry: Meeting is hard. Why can’t you meet?

George: Can’t meet! Why is that?

Jerry: This is what single people are thinking about the minute they wake up in the morning. And yet we’re surrounded by people, they’re right next to us, on the bus, on the street! But we can’t meet them.

George: Why won’t they meet us?

Jerry: Because strangers have a bad reputation.

George: A few bad strangers have ruined it for the rest of us!

Jerry: It’s unfortunate.

We’ll never meet two jackasses we love this much again, will we? Surely there’s some government-mandated way to force them to keep producing episodes, for the good of the nation!

But bringing the best sitcom of all time back from the dead is hard. Why is that? Why won’t they come back for us? Because reunions and revivals and comedic resuscitations have a bad reputation. A few crappy reunion specials have ruined it for the rest of us!

Having said that, this revisited, pseudo-”Seinfeld” reunion was about as fun and as satisfying as any “Seinfeld” reunion could be, and for that, Larry and Jerry and the rest have our deepest thanks. 

Seinfeld’s sensibility, so oblique it’s concrete, does surface now and then in “Bee Movie”: The picture is peppered with jokes that are there, and yet not fully there, like the holes in French bread. There are a few great gags, including one in which Barry, having dodged certain death via a rolled-up shopping circular, explains how every bee learns to fear modest and glossy periodicals alike: “I lost a cousin to a copy of Italian Vogue,” he tells the human friend Vanessa (voiced by Renée Zellweger) he’s got a crush on.

But “Bee Movie” is just another ambitious, lavish animated adventure, pretty enough to look at, but ultimately foundering on the weakness of its script. Barry B. Benson is a bee like any other, having gone to school for three days (one each for grammar school, high school and college) in preparation for a lifetime of work, work and more work at the honey-producing corporation known as Honex. Each bee at Honex gets a job to do, which he happily does for life. Barry’s best pal, Adam Flayman (Matthew Broderick), is OK with that arrangement, but Barry wants more out of his little bee life. His parents, Janet and Martin (their voices belong to Kathy Bates and Barry Levinson, respectively), don’t see what the problem is. “Would it kill you to make a little honey?” they implore. But Barry is too curious about the world outside the hive: He wants adventure, and when Vanessa, a kindhearted florist, first scoops him out of harm’s way, he understandably falls for her. As he spends more time in the human world, he realizes, with horror, that people actually steal honey from bees. He tries to redress that wrong by suing the human race, with consequences he never could have predicted.

From an environmentally conscious point of view, the core idea here is sound enough, particularly if you’ve paid any attention to the recent news stories about how the decreasing bee population threatens to alter the delicate balance of our environment. But that doesn’t make the jokes in “Bee Movie” any funnier, or the characters any more appealing. Nor does it make the animation more impressive or more charming. “Bee Movie” has a soft but vibrant color palette, and the design of the characters is pleasing enough: Barry has an inquisitive expression, and flits around in a black-and-yellow striped sweater with coordinating Chuck Taylors at the end of his spindly little legs. Vanessa, with her alert, almond-shaped eyes, doesn’t have the creepy hyperhuman quality of the characters in the “Shrek” movies: She looks blessedly cartoonlike (and I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that, in her fitted striped cardigans and pedal-pusher jeans, she also has a pretty nice rack).

But “Bee Movie” just lacks spirit and energy. Part of the problem may be that, as far as I’m concerned, any animated movie released this year (and possibly in years to come) suffers in comparison with Brad Bird’s “Ratatouille,” a beautifully animated picture whose details and design serve a story and characters that are solid to begin with. “Bee Movie” is clever enough, but only in fits and starts. Too many of the movie’s gags are just filler: The pollen jocks, those lucky, supermasculine fighter-pilot types who are chosen to leave the hive and pollinate the world of plants, are praised as “nectar collectors.” When Barry and Adam graduate from college, Barry, looking at the assembled mass of bee-students, remarks, “Wow! Quite a bit of pomp — under the circumstances.” Even the Italian Vogue gag is recycled later in the movie, and it’s funny only the first time. Only Chris Rock, as a bloodthirsty mosquito, gives the picture any recognizable jolt of life. The rest of “Bee Movie” neither floats like a butterfly nor stings like a — well, you know. That buzz around it is nothing more than hype.

But for all of his countless flaws and terrible ideas, the Misguided Idealist has more passion in his little finger than a roomful of Passive-Aggressive Worrywarts, Self-Conscious Ironists, Bloviating Blowhards and Naysaying Neurotics combined. While the rest of us can list a million reasons to do nothing and keep quiet, to sit on the sidelines and whine softly until it’s all over and there’s nothing left to hope for anyway, the Misguided Idealist sticks his neck out, and this hard, cold world does the chopping. But even as the realities and facts come crumbling down around him, even as his big head rolls across the chopping block, he offers us a brief reprieve from our stagnant lives, where we toe the line and act appropriately and do what’s done, all without an original thought in our big, empty heads.

Speak for yourself, right? Well, that’s what the Misguided Idealist does every day of his cursed, uncomfortable life. And when they bury him, and the eulogists sum up all of his creative intelligence and his passionate beliefs and his imaginative alternatives with limp, inadequate words, calling him “opinionated” and “outspoken,” when they admit that he sometimes got on their nerves but gosh, was he tenacious — in a tone implying that his tenacity was sort of cute but mostly lamentable and awkward to behold — even then, the Misguided Idealist remains just as underappreciated and misunderstood as he ever was.

Shane on you
Vic Mackey of FX’s “The Shield” (sixth season premieres at 10 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, April 3) is just the sort of Misguided Idealist who’s charismatic enough to lead most of us over the nearest cliff. Unlike most Misguided Idealists, Mackey (Michael Chiklis) is pragmatic, to a point: A law enforcer who has no faith in the law, he’s willing to busts heads and take bribes and play dirty to serve what he sees as the greater good. Of course, Mackey’s greater good always includes a very necessary murder or two, plus enough cash to keep his autistic son in a special school. Even so, he’s a fiercely protective father figure who, sadly, often chooses the wrong children to embrace, and wanders down insupportable, perilous paths.

When Mackey did find himself a loyal foot soldier in Curtis Lemansky (Kenny Johnson), the man ended up dead, by the hand of none other than Mackey’s self-serving prodigal son, Shane (Walton Goggins). In last year’s disturbing season finale, Shane used a grenade pilfered from a Salvadoran gang to blow poor Lem to smithereens in his own car, making it look like an act of vengeance. Beady-eyed Shane is exactly the sort of Foolhardy Follower — selfish, flinchy, shortsighted — who’s attracted by Mackey’s corrupt-Daddy appeal, but even Daddy Mack couldn’t soothe Shane’s fears that Lem, who was facing jail time, might rat on the strike team and land everyone in jail for their various illegal activities.

Of course, we at home knew that Lem wasn’t about to rat, and that Shane, in turn, would rat in two seconds if it saved him from the big house. These are the tragic ironies we encounter so often on “The Shield,” merciless twists that are part of the show’s dark appeal. Instead of being dragged down or exhausted by this deeply unfair universe, though, the whole sick boat stays afloat, thanks in part to the brisk pace, the immediacy of each scene and the strength of Mackey’s personality.

Emboldened by years of dodging prosecution, Mackey felt he could devise a way to wriggle out of any bind. Last season, he assumed that, if he tried hard enough, he could thwart Lt. Jon Kavanaugh (Forest Whitaker) and dig Lem and the rest of the strike team out of the mess they were in. In this sixth season, we find Mackey faced with failure: Even if he finds Lem’s killer (or believes that he’s found his killer) and avenges Lem’s death, he still must face the fact that he failed to protect a member of his team.

It should be satisfying to see Mackey suffer, after years of enduring his arrogance and his sadism and his manipulations. And maybe it’s not so bad to see him squirm. But ultimately, we want him to devise a way out of this and every other bind. We may identify with the more ethical forces in the Farmington police department, like Detective Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder), but we still want Mackey to outsmart her. We want this guy to get away with murder.

Shane is another matter. Will he get away with killing his friend? Will Kavanaugh succeed in taking Mackey down? Unlike so many other shows that drop a huge bomb on the audience in the season finale, and then do a sloppy job of cleaning up the mess at the start of the next season, “The Shield” doesn’t disappoint. The chaos in the wake of Lem’s death is just as strange and smart and complicated as it should be, with twists and turns and resolutions that feel organic but also unexpected. I don’t generally love cop shows, but each episode (FX sent the first six) was so fast-paced and suspenseful and gripping, I just couldn’t stop myself from watching the next one. It’s pretty amazing that, after five seasons, a cop show like “The Shield” could still be this addictive.

If you haven’t watched this show, the Misguided Idealist in me wants to urge you to rent all five seasons in rapid succession. Vic Mackey is the kind of bad cop that Shakespeare would dream up, if he were in the business of penning procedural dramas.

Fast forward
Of course, Shakespeare was the sort of Misguided Idealist who had the flexibility and imagination to recognize the humor in life’s lowest moments and most tragic turns. The same can be said of Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, whose documentary “So Much So Fast” (premieres on “Frontline” on Tuesday, April 3, on PBS, check listings) seeks out moments of levity and wisdom and sweetness and hope in an otherwise very sad story.

Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, when he was 29 years old, and doctors told him he had five years to live. While other families might have grabbed the hankies and settled in for a long wait, Stephen’s older brother Jamie turned out to be a Misguided Idealist in waiting. Jamie took action, starting a nonprofit organization dedicated to randomly testing drugs to see if they had any success in treating ALS.

Naturally, Jamie’s somewhat sloppy approach to finding appropriate drugs was viewed as a shot in the dark by doctors and scientists used to far more conservative, deliberate methods. But ALS research was incomplete and underfunded, and those more cautious methods would take years. Jamie saw himself as fighting against the clock to save his brother.

While Jamie toiled around the clock, Stephen spent his time with his wife and baby son, trying to enjoy his days with them. The camera captures his mix of patience, humor, resignation and denial throughout his slow decline into the nightmare of ALS. Even as his steps slow down, his speech becomes slurred and eventually he must depend on a wheelchair to move and a computer to communicate, Stephen retains a dark sense of humor and generous attitude toward his family.

Throughout “So Much So Fast,” it’s hard not to feel grateful to be allowed such an intimate look at a family’s evolution in the face of disaster. While Jamie throws his entire life into his foundation and he and his wife drift apart, Stephen takes the time to savor every second with his wife and baby. Time speeds up and slows down and we get lost in the little moments of Stephen’s life. We take extreme joy in his smallest triumphs and his dry wisecracks, and then we grit our teeth and wring our hands over the fact that Jamie’s foundation is losing money. The filmmakers have an obvious appreciation for the oddities and quirks of the personalities in this family, and they take pains to document not only the progression of ALS in Stephen, but the family’s slow evolution in coming to terms with Stephen’s fate.

Best award show ever
But not all Misguided Idealists are enforcing the law or running nonprofit organizations. A gaggle of them work at HBO, where, together, they come up with all kinds of big ideas, many of them terrible: “Hey, I know! Let’s take the breathtakingly original historical drama ‘Deadwood’ off the air just short of its fourth and final chapter, and let’s have David Milch work on a show about a surfer instead!”

At a recent meeting, apparently one of the Misguided Idealists said to the others, “Hey, there’s not really a big award for comedians, so let’s create one and give it out at our annual comedy festival!” Yes, only HBO would have the audacity to invent its own award for comedians and then have the rocks to call it “The Comedian Award,” suggesting that it’s the only award for comedians that will ever exist, anywhere. To make the whole thing even more confusing, in its first run, they give “The Comedian Award” to Jerry Seinfeld, a comedian who appeared in the 2002 movie “The Comedian.”

Thus, when I received a DVD at my doorstep that was labeled, simply, “Jerry Seinfeld: The Comedian Award” (9 p.m. EDT Sunday, April 1, on HBO), I figured it must be related to the documentary, in which Seinfeld forsakes the life of the idle rich to go back to his roots cracking jokes to surly crowds in smelly comedy clubs across the country. Instead, what I found was Anderson Cooper sitting in a chair on a stage with Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, Chris Rock and Robert Klein. Seeing some of the funniest humans alive (Cooper included) gathered in one place, I couldn’t exactly blow it off, and I was glad I didn’t.

What transpired was a very odd conversation between the four comedians, one that Cooper tried to interrupt occasionally with his very straight, newsy non sequiturs. Apparently, Rock, Shandling and Klein agree that Seinfeld may be the comedy world’s ultimate Misguided Idealist. The man has a serious work ethic, and he’s a perfectionist to boot, a strange combination for a comedian. Instead of resting on his solid-gold laurels (Rock volunteers that he’d never work that hard if he were so rich), Seinfeld went back to doing stand-up, and if clips shown here (and in “Comedian”) are any indication, he’s funnier than ever.

Before Seinfeld receives his ugly glass award and gives a hilariously annoyed speech about the total stupidity of awards in general (that sounds bad, I know, but as with so many mundane topics, Seinfeld makes it work), this unpredictable and thoroughly entertaining conversation reminds us just how confident, smart and charismatic you have to be to hold an audience’s attention onstage. The comics trade quips along with compliments for Seinfeld, who stops them in the middle of a flood of praise and says something like, “I love this show! Can this be a series?”

But as Seinfeld himself points out, compared to being an actor, being a comedian is pretty tough: You not only have to write everything yourself, but then you have to get onstage, without any costumes or props or sidekicks, and make people laugh with what you wrote. This strange little award special is odd and funny and it makes you glad that there are Misguided Idealists out there like Seinfeld who are crazy enough to do such a difficult job instead of, say, languishing about their enormous estates, reading Tom Clancy novels.

She wouldn’t have a Willy or a Sam!
Speaking of languishing about enormous estates, Showtime’s “The Tudors” (premieres 10 p.m. EDT Sunday, April 1; the first two episodes are also available online) shows us just how good it is to be king, even when you’re short and fat and kind of ugly.

Oh wait! Showtime’s Henry VIII isn’t a pudgy redhead, he’s a tall, glamorous drink of water played by pouty-lipped bad-boy Jonathan Rhys Myers! With a $38 million budget and lots of beautiful costumes, elaborate castle sets and bubble-breasted handmaidens, “The Tudors” takes all of the intrigue and power struggles and tomfoolery of the House of Tudor and gives it six-pack abs and a rock-star swagger.

Fair enough, this is TV. Unlike his contemporary and advisor Sir Thomas More (Jeremy Northam) and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (Sam Neill), the king may be misguided but he’s much more of a hedonist than an idealist: All he appears to care about is women and power. Which would be fine, but it’s pretty obvious that the real Henry VIII was far more nuanced and intelligent and original than the childish playboy depicted in “The Tudors.” While Rhys Myers does a good job with Henry’s haughty outbursts, he doesn’t really bring any unexpected flair or thoughtful tics to this picture. We believe him as a bored monarch, looking for action and excitement and a chance to air his petty grievances, even if it means plunging his country into war. But do we want to watch him for more than a few hours?

Eventually there will be twists and turns and crazy King Henry will fall madly in love, but so far this series looks like lots of sex and flashy sets without much well-crafted dialogue or intriguing character development to back it up. We can only hope this preening, too-sexy Henry will hit his stride in time, ridding Europe of Misguided Idealists and making England safe for Sluggish Second-Guessers and Dallying Divorced Kings once and for all.

Next week: Tony tangles with a Misguided Idealist in the family, when “The Sopranos” returns for its final bow.