Live, but not lively, from Abbey Road

"Live from Abbey Road" is a great idea for a TV show. Unfortunately, this isn't it.

With a title like "Live From Abbey Road," a viewer would rightfully expect a look at how the London studio famed as the site where the Beatles worked in the '60s affects those who record there today: how the sound and the feel of the studio influence the artists.

There's none of that though in the second-season premiere, which runs at 9 p.m. today on the Sundance Channel. Instead, it's just a performance piece that happens to be set in a recording studio. It's sort of like PBS' "Austin City Limits," only without the audience - in other words, without the excitement.

That's not to say it's worthless; it's just not the insightful, all-encompassing music series it could be.

The concept of how a producer and a studio alter a band's sound is actually quite interesting. Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney himself contributed a delightful segment to a PBS documentary on Sam Phillips by recording at his Sun Records studio in Memphis, famed for its intimate, echoed sound quality. (When Elvis Presley was sold to RCA and recorded in New York City, legend has it they had to run wire to a speaker in a bathroom down the hall and leave the recording-studio door open to get the same echoed effect on his vocals.)

Abbey Road is known for its clarity, but also as the place that helped inspire the Beatles to record some of their best music, including their final album of the same title. Yet there's nothing about sound quality to this series, and only a few muttered artist remarks paying homage to the Beatles as lip service to their legacy. Instead, the acts pretty much show up, cut their tunes and get out.

That places the emphasis on the quality of the artists in establishing the quality of the series, and the second season of "Abbey Road" does get off to a decent start tonight with Mary J. Blige.

"One day I woke up and realized I was going to have to get down to work," says the reluctant soul diva. The three songs she records for tonight's episode do find her striving for a poppier, less sultry, more straightforward sound, although whether that was dictated by the studio or by Sundance - Robert Redford's cable channel, which tends to be utterly white when it isn't going green over some environmental special - is never addressed.

"I like what I see when I'm looking at me when I'm walking past a mirror," Blige sings, and what's not to like, both in her look and her sound? Although, truth be told, her band does seem to lack a little something, perhaps because her drummer is wearing a White Sox cap while her guitarist wears a Yankee cap, and we know what traditional rivals those teams are.

After that, however, Blige is followed by the group Dashboard Confessional, best described as alternative-mainstream. If that label seems oxymoronic, there's no "oxy" element to the band's moronic lyrics such as: "Where there's gold, there's a gold digger." That's so inflated, self-important and misogynistic it makes Blige seem humble.

Then there's James Blunt doing his update of the old tenderoni Donovan trip, and if indeed he pours passion into his insipid songs, it should be said they might actually benefit from a little stoicism.

Dude, what you're saying with your songs shouldn't make you so overwrought.

That's the story of "Live From Abbey Road" this season, though: As the artists go, so goes the series. Next week finds Kate Nash and Herbie Hancock checking in, with Joan Armatrading set for July 10. If the complementary Sheryl Crow and Diana Krall are set for July 17, beware the following week and the unlikely pairing of Matchbox Twenty and Def Leppard.

Manu Chao is also supposed to show up later in the 12-episode season, and that actually should be worth waiting for. His set at the Aragon Ballroom last year was so hot it sent some listeners fleeing into the streets for relief. Now there's someone who might actually benefit from playing alone with his band in an air-conditioned studio.