Tricky series pull fast ones with review episodes

Ugly TV Criticism Truth No. 7: You rarely ever get a complete picture of a series before you review it.

If a network series debuts in the fall, odds are you'll only get one episode, two at the most, to consider. For midseason series, you can expect two or three episodes. And for cable series, you can count on three, sometimes four.

There are exceptions. HBO's "The Wire" has been known to send out a full season. The same goes for Showtime's "Brotherhood." And CBS recently made available six of this season's seven episodes of "Jericho."

But for the most part, it's like having to critique a restaurant you left after the tater skins. The movie you fled after the first explosion. Or the concert you blew off as soon as some knucklehead screamed for "Freebird" or spilled a beer on you. (Odds are, the same knucklehead did both.)

That's not always a problem. It didn't take more than a couple of minutes to know that, say, "The West Wing" would be a classic. Or that "Viva Laughlin" wouldn't last a week.

But for most everything else, getting an accurate impression of a show's up-to-22-episode season based on one or two installments can be tricky.

This fall, NBC's "Chuck" and The CW's "Reaper" looked like the best new shows based on their pilots, but those first episodes ended up being the high points of each. ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money" and NBC's "Life," meanwhile, started out good and only got better, making them, over time, truly the best new series.

Then there are the times the review episodes are in no way, shape or form a true representation of a series.

Take FX's "Nip/Tuck," which just wrapped its fifth season. The two episodes the channel sent out were laugh-out-loud funny with their behind-the-scenes looks at a howlingly bad medical drama that hired Sean (Dylan Walsh) and Christian (Julian McMahon) as consultants. I couldn't stop raving that the series had regained its must-see status.

Then episode three aired -- revealing Matt's (John Hensley) meth addiction and the soon-to-turn-violent obsession Sean's ex-wife's girlfriend's 18-year-old daughter had with him -- and it was all downhill from there.

Recent episodes saw Christian having sex with his HIV-positive ex-lover before flipping her off a balcony to her death; her funeral, at which members of her sex addicts support group eulogized her by graphically complimenting her various sexual talents; Sean's agent (Sharon Gless) killing a rival by filling him full of teddy bear stuffing; Matt dating his half sister; male prostitution; cannibalism; and little old lady sex (twice!). And to think, I used to only hide my eyes during some of the more graphic surgeries.

"Nip/Tuck" may have moved from Miami to L.A. this season, but its new home is closer to the love child of Sodom and Gomorrah -- if Gomorrah had a habit of tossing back thalidomide shooters.

Sharing a city, and a sensibility that's almost as dark, is "Dirt" (10 p.m. Sunday, FX), the other series that pulled a fast one on me.

When it premiered last January, the series was a fascinatingly off-kilter look at tabloid editor Lucy Spiller (Courteney Cox) and her schizophrenic best/only friend, paparazzo Don Konkey (Ian Hart).

But the crazier Konkey got, the crazier the show got. And by the time "Dirt" stumbled to its finale that saw Lucy slowly dying from knife wounds inflicted by a drugged-out starlet she ruined, it seemed like a fitting end.

Now, though, Konkey's taking his meds and is pretty much normal. Unfortunately, the show's pretty much normal, too. If only there were a happy medium.

So far, the sex and perversion that was as much a part of each episode as the opening credits is nonexistent. (I can only assume Lucy's vibrator held out for more money.)

Instead, "Dirt's" new strike-shortened, seven-episode season is all about ripped-from-the-headlines stories that feel even lazier than the various "Law & Orders" at their worst.

Paris Hilton's legal escapades are retold nearly verbatim through Milan Carlton (Elisabeth Harnois), which is slightly more clever than naming her London Marriott or Denver Econo Lodge, but still. Carlton is "a spoiled little billionaire who's gotten away with everything her whole life" and is now receiving special treatment behind bars.

Also along for the ride is sitcom star Jimmy Darby (Tom Arnold), who combines Alec Baldwin's inconsiderate-daughter voice mail rant with David Hasselhoff's drunken, videotaped night spent eating off the floor.

For a series that even at its worst was unlike anything else on TV, "Dirt" has become almost exactly like everything else on TV.

But all that could change. After all, FX only sent out two episodes.

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Mondays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.