I miss "Deadline" already. Most TV shows with grisly plot lines feature a main character who goes around with a grim look on his face, letting us know that the world can really get you down sometimes. "Deadline" just wallowed in the mire.

It was about a crusading New York tabloid columnist, played with a shady panache by the gloriously oversized Oliver Platt, all three-piece suits and sarcasm. He was supposed to be dislikable, and for much of the show was. There was also a rat's nest of supporting players, including Hope Davis as his disgusted wife, from whom he was separated but with whom he sometimes still slept; Bebe Neuwirth as the tab's ill-tempered managing editor; and Lili Taylor as some sort of functionary. The show was about how crusading for justice isn't as simple as it sounds; in the first episode, for example, Platt found out that a kid was unjustly convicted of a mass killing because he didn't have an alibi -- he'd been killing someone else somewhere else at the time. In another episode, Neuwirth carried on an affair with a wanted felon. "What are they gonna do to me?" she said, capturing the arrogance of the press with bleak accuracy.

Then it got really seamy. In the final episode broadcast, Platt met a mob moll at a boxing match. The fight ended in a melee; the two snuck out and had wild monkey sex. The moll turned up beaten to death the next day, and everyone in the newsroom thought Platt did it.

Even in this age of the stylish antihero, "Deadline" was too much for viewers. No one watched it, and most critics didn't like it. NBC didn't even bother screwing around with different time slots -- "Deadline" was dead after its fourth episode.

"C.S.I." is hanging on, somehow; it's actually a hit. This humorless, preposterous show features the usually classy William Petersen (he starred in Michael Mann's "Manhunter") as Grissom, the head of a drearily serious crime-scene unit. The credits show a bunch of investigators peering intently at shoelaces to the tune of the Who's "Who Are You." The characters talk in a mixture of hepster patois and yawny clichés. When Grissom tells an underling to do something, she says, "I'm gone!" When a pair of voice prints match, a sound analyst says, "Disco!" It all gets old fast.

The first few minutes of tonight's episode, in which it's discovered that an ostensible suicide is not only faked, but part of a pattern of such crimes, makes you want to slap the scriptwriter really hard. There's a suicide message on a tape recorder, which for some reason has been recorded backward. Everyone knows what voices sound like recorded backward, right? Not on "C.S.I."

"What kind of language is that? Swedish?" an investigator asks. "It's backward," Petersen replies gravely. A minute later, still at the crime scene, he's listening to it the right way in a room with a closed door. (Wouldn't you need special equipment to do that?) "He's getting his mojo working," says the investigator. Petersen barks out orders his crew must have heard a million times before as if they were new: "I want every inch of the bathroom checked for prints!" he says gruffly. He gives the print-checker a special vial of red powder: "Serious case, serious print powder," he says.

All of this dialogue is delivered with deadly seriousness. The show is shot with an icy blue sheen, broken only by pointless bits of foofaraw, like a Rubik's cube, and ugly special effects, like a bullet shooting into a body, a shot cribbed from "Three Kings." But in that film the point was to underscore the destructive potential of every bullet; here it's just showy nonsense -- like the rest of the program.

(M.R.)

Sunday, Nov. 26: "Ed" (NBC, 8 p.m.)

"Ed" isn't on!! In its stead is some sort of student audition film, with a chubby woman on a cruise ship trying to act very high society in contrast to a young man who's supposed to be a lowlife artist. Neither is convincing. Several minutes go by before I realize -- it's the network premiere of "Titanic"!

(M.R.)

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