Holmes comes to epitomize 'Eli Stone's' sweetness
"Eli Stone" is treacly and tender and sentimental, with a head as soft and mushy as its heart. Yet at 9 p.m. Tuesday on ABC's WLS Channel 7 it gets a jolt from someone who comes to embody its particular sort of sweetness, and it's pretty irresistible.
Even a curmudgeon of a TV critic might find himself jumping for joy on the couch over tonight's episode. And, believe me, up until now I hadn't really considered myself much of a fan of Katie Holmes.
Holmes, however, steps in for George Michael in the musical visions Jonny Lee Miller's Eli is once again having, since his brain aneurysm returned in last week's season premiere. Not only that, but she soon turns up as a character as well, an idealistic fellow attorney named, not coincidentally, Grace.
Nothing much is coincidental in this show, which plays at big issues like faith and God even as it plucks at the heartstrings with its tenderoni background music. Yet there is something winsome in Eli's every scene with Grace.
For one night at least, Katie Holmes gives "Eli Stone" a reason for being.
It's about time, because otherwise this series is so muddle-headed it's apt to annoy rather than entertain. Eli works at a law firm run by Victor Garber's Jordan Wethersby. Starting Tuesday, Garber goes against his gruff stereotype: Just as Eli survived his initial aneurysm surgery at the end of last season, Jordan has also just survived a near-death experience in last week's season premiere, and he returns intending to turn his cutthroat firm into a pro-bono outfit, much to the chagrin of partners Marcy and Martin, played by Katey Sagal and Tom Amandes (who previously played a similar heavy on "Everwood").
Eli, meanwhile, is engaged in a typically bathetic court case involving Ken Howard, as a father trying to halt the military burial of his son, who died serving in Iraq.
If Eli's sage Asian buddy, Dr. Chen, played by James Saito, isn't enough to make a viewer throw up his or her hands - and the remote control - in exasperation, this contrived subplot is. Yet Holmes makes everything all right every time she appears on the screen.
She steps out of Eli's visions and into his real life at a baseball game. Never mind where she got the ticket that placed her in the same section with Eli and his brother, Matt Letscher's Nate, nor how they meet cute.
When Eli gazes at her, it suddenly makes sense that he's such a namby-pamby milquetoast. She makes him not simply stupid, but legitimately stupefied.
"God, I'm so boring," he says at one point, and he's got that right. But he and Grace have a way about them that seems to complete some sort of circle. Will that circle be unbroken? Sorry, but I can't reveal one way or the other.
Still, a viewer is apt to say, "Never mind this or that," a lot about this show. It has an abundance of flaws, with a weakness for mystical spirituality foremost among them. When Sigourney Weaver popped up last week as Eli's new therapist to say, "I think you're missing having a sense of the divine in your everyday life," it was as if she were prescribing amphetamines for a maniac. There's quite enough godliness in "Eli" already; it doesn't need any more quasi-religious mumbo jumbo.
What it needs is to plant itself firmly on the ground with some real human interaction, and it gets that from Holmes' Grace, right up through a typically cinematic "magical airport moment."
Katie Holmes turns out to be all the magic this show needs, but we'll just have to wait and see if the series can find new tricks to sustain viewer interest in the weeks ahead.
In the air
Remotely interesting: PBS' "Independent Lens" returns to Chicago's 1968 Democratic Convention and the ensuing court battles with the documentary "Chicago 10" at 9 p.m. Wednesday on WTTW Channel 11.
Turner Classic Movies runs a gangster-film marathon starting with the new documentary "Public Enemies" at 7 p.m. today. The following movies begin and end with Jimmy Cagney: in "The Public Enemy" at 8:45 and "White Heat" at 3 a.m. ... Impressionist Frank Caliendo returns with a new season of "Frank TV" at 10 p.m. today on TBS.
End of the dial: John Dempsey has been promoted to managing editor at all-talk WLS 890-AM. Monica DeSantis has been added as afternoon reporter for Roe Conn's show and as evening anchor.
Laura Ingraham's syndicated show has been dropped by WIND 560-AM and picked up by WKRS 1220-AM, where it airs from 4 to 7 p.m. weekdays.