Dear Diary:

On reruns in San Francisco, the "Seinfeld" episode tonight is one of the show's quintessentially blithe mélanges: three story lines, each ineffable in its caustic elegance. Kramer is down in Florida with Jerry's parents, running for condo board president; he gets tripped up in a scandal unique to a retirement community. Elaine's going out with a guy who might be black; he thinks she's Hispanic. And George is caught in a lie by his dead fiancée's parents -- he doesn't really have a summer home in the Hamptons, but is trapped into driving the two of them out to see it.

Elaine and the boyfriend grope in a fog of inappropriate thoughts and actions; Kramer and Jerry's dad flail blindly in a humiliation of their own making, and pull a not entirely innocent bystander (Jerry) down with them. And George, well, George is on an existential drive into a fiction, accompanied by implacable in-laws from a marriage that never existed.

Frasier (NBC, 9 p.m.)

The Niles-Daphne romance is insane. Who wants to see a long-running unconsummated romance consummated? I hope "Ed" doesn't make this mistake. It's very important that Ed remain hanging in a romantic purgatory masquerading as his beckoning hometown. Anyway, Niles, Daphne and Frasier are being sued by Donny, who's still mad that Daphne jilted him -- jilted him big time, as Dick Cheney would say. Frasier flirts almost manically with his lawyer.

It's certainly true, as people have said, that Frasier Crane and his brother, Niles, are blatantly gay; Frasier's compulsive attempts to rut virtually every woman he comes into contact with is a sometimes discomfiting manifestation of a deeply closeted persona. In this episode there's something almost too bald about his urges; he's like a walking, talking phallus.

A phallus with money issues, that is. The plot complication is that Frasier thinks his lawyer charged him too much, a suspicion heightened once the family gets a sense of how she subtly overcharges clients for her time. This is a classic Seinfeldian dilemma: Sexual desires complicated other, sometimes stronger ones, generally involving money or food. (Jerry once started sleeping with his maid, who promptly stopped cleaning his apartment but not cashing his checks.) But "Frasier" is ultimately too superficial a show (and too dishonest about its main characters in its conception) to bear such an unforgiving subtext. When the lawyer sends Frasier packing, the comment is merely on the rutting male, not the human condition.

"The Geena Davis Show" (ABC, 8 p.m.)

Poor Geena Davis. Her TV show is a classic example of a star needing a vehicle, and ending up with a fast ride to nowhere. The shtick of "The Geena Davis Show" is that she's some sort of unspecified Type A suddenly part of a minifamily, in the form of her boyfriend and his two kids. There's something subversive in the conception: Davis and her two girlfriends, who form a bitchy Greek chorus to comment on the action, represent a resolute opposition to kids and family. But the show doesn't have the courage of this premise. The kids are cute, and Davis is always trying to endear herself to them: The joke of the show turns out to be that she's a supposed overachiever who can't get parenting right.

And besides it's all weighed down with clumsy sitcom conventions, an annoying laugh track and crude sets; there's an elementary-school auction, for example, staged with extreme cheese. (The extras look like mannequins.) Davis has an office sidekick who speaks in a really weird voice, roughly that of the cop in "Dumb & Dumber" when he drank the soda bottle full of urine. "I don't need to check with my psychic friend to know where this is going," Davis' African-American friend, somewhat stereotypically, says at one point. Neither do we.

(M.R.)

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