Beyond good and evil

Sometimes a pilot episode can be so good it leaves a series no place to go, while other times a debut is so full of holes the writers and actors can actually have fun filling them in over time -- if they get the chance.

Two new ABC series premiering in the next few days both place in the latter category. Neither is great to start, but both are, well, interesting; there's no better way to put it. The actors make the characters engaging enough so that a viewer wants to know what happens to them, even if the actual drama or comedy is less than convincing.

"Women's Murder Club" stars Angie Harmon as a homicide investigator when it debuts at 8 p.m. today on WLS Channel 7. The former "Law & Order" star is lean and lithe as San Francisco detective Lindsay Boxer. The title comes from her close personal and professional relationships with Laura Harris' Assistant District Attorney Jill Bernhardt and Paula Newsome's Medical Examiner Claire Washburn. Along the way tonight they'll pick up a new friend and colleague in Aubrey Dollar's newspaper reporter Cindy Thomas.

These women spring fully formed onto the screen (in part because they already inhabit a series of books by James Patterson). It seems as if they've been working together for years -- and I mean not just the characters, but the actors. In the middle of a murder investigation, they chide Linz about not calling back her ex-husband, Tom, and they comment cattily on a corpse's pubic hairdo.

The comic note rings flat sometimes, and the police-procedural element is fairly formulaic. Yet there's a lot going on in this series, with writer-creators Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain throwing in a serious subplot about how tonight's victim was a nearly friendless woman "obsessed with her job," which not coincidentally was the reason Lindsay's own marriage failed.

That gives the pert, prim, if eminently capable Jill pause as she considers living with her boyfriend. "This is why I'm not moving in with Luke," she says. "Moving in leads to marriage and marriage leads to ick."

Yet don't miss what happens when Kyle Secor, the old "Homicide: Life on the Street" detective, ambles in as a high-profile defense attorney. Meanwhile, Claire offers counterpoint dealing patiently with her wheelchair-bound husband.

Tonight's premiere isn't great by any means, but it sets a show in motion about four entrancing women and how they work together and help each through tough times -- or not. And there's even a running murder mystery, about the "Kiss Me Not Killer," that figures to drag this show and its blithe sense of humor toward some serious drama. Try it, and I don't believe you'll go back to "Friday Night Lights" -- much less "Moonlight."

The comedy "Samantha Who?" opens with one of the most hackneyed premises out there: a woman wakes up from a coma suffering from retrograde amnesia, meaning that she recalls everything about the world, but nothing about her personal life. She has to relearn friends, family, all human contacts.

Does this really happen? All I know is it happens a lot more on TV than in real life. Yet the surprising thing about "Samantha Who?" when it debuts at 8:30 p.m. Monday on Channel 7 is how well it works as a star vehicle for Christina Applegate.

The twist is this: Applegate's Samantha Newly seems nice enough. But what she and the audience discover is she went astray somewhere, in that before her accident she had become a horrible person.

Jean Smart returns to comedy as her mother, Regina, and when Samantha suggests, "You made me who I am," Mom replies, "That is a terrible thing to say."

It turns out Samantha hasn't even spoken to her parents in two years, and it's been longer than that since she's seen her childhood best friend, Dena, played by former "Gilmore Girls" chef Melissa McCarthy in one of the most welcome comebacks of the season.

Then there's her current BFF, Jennifer Esposito's Andrea, who is trying to drag Samantha back to her trendy, elitist, me-first lifestyle. She reveals that Samantha is cheating on her live-in boyfriend, played by Barry Watson.

"Oh, I'm bad," Sam moans.

"Yeah," Andrea purrs.

This is ridiculous stuff, but Applegate, whom I've never really esteemed all that much as a comedian, makes it work by straddling good and evil with a wide-eyed wonder over what she's capable of. (When her old personality emerges in biting asides, Andrea says, "My baby's in there somewhere.") And writers Cecelia Ahern and Donald Todd make it signify, getting comic mileage out of the very idea of human nature.

Andrea insists Samantha doesn't belong with dumpy old friends like Dena.

"If people could change, would you be you?" she says.

"Good point," Dena has to concede.

There may also be a larger cultural significance. I'm struck by the idea that Samantha represents the American electorate (Aunt Samantha to Uncle Sam?), just now awaking to the realization of what it had become. No, we can't be a country that invades weaker nations under trumped-up causes, that imprisons foreigners without due process and tortures captives, can we? And if so, where do we go from here, are we good or evil?

But I'm probably just reading into it. "Samantha Who?" is just a stoopid sitcom done passably well. Good or bad? It's both. Don't give it a second thought.