Dead Center

Commander In Chief

Airing Tuesdays at 9 pm on ABC

By Troy Patterson

The people in the crowd, in the main, were at the mean-middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow. It was easy to imagine the tens of thousands of hours of TV each had soaked up with agreeable eyes. This was last Thursday night at The Museum of Television and Radio. The MT&R was running a program of fall pilot previews: Six networks, six evenings of cocktails and screenings, all of it as free as the airwaves and open to the General Public. "The buzz starts here," went the slogan, anxiously.

In the lobby, at the open bar, the General Public behaved with far greater humanity than any pack of journalists I'd ever seen in the same room as free gin. Farther in, by the elevators, our group munched avidly on finger sandwiches. A respectable crudités platter sat beneath a portrait of William S. Paley, founding father of the Columbia Broadcasting System and of this joint, too. Paley looked far more smug than he does as played by Frank Langella in the upcoming Good Night, and Good Luck, which movie has the dramatic smarts to suggest that Bill Paley possibly lost a bit of sleep before deciding to hamstring Edward R. Murrow. Paley looked as smug as a Medici. The crudités spread was soon picked clean, except for the celery sticks. At the appointed hour, we descended the staircase in ones and twos (so many ones?) to the theater, there to be distracted, deluded, amused and insulated, as Saint Edward has it in his famed formulation.

It was ABC's night. Thus, there would be The Night Stalker (Thursdays at 9 pm, starts Sept. 29), a remake of the '70s cult classic that's betting its success on our appetite for more paranormal thrills on the order of ABC's own Lost. And there would be Invasion (Wednesdays at 10 pm), a serial about an alien presence in a hurricane-ravaged town that's betting its success on our appetite for more paranormal.... Conventional wisdom says that Invasion's natural disaster plot could be a tough sell in light of recent events, and conventional wisdom has its uses. In any case, the show's frights are fairly well-timed, its hero's dimples fairly deep, and its child-in-peril quite cute. But first there was Commander In Chief, a zippy hour of political fantasia starring Geena Davis as the president of the United States.

Here we are in Paris, in a near-future or not-quite-present, listening along with Davis' Vice-President Mackenzie Allen as a chorus of French children sings "America the Beautiful." The president's chief of staff calls Allen out of the concert with urgent news: "The President"-that would be one Teddy Roosevelt Bridges-"has a bleeding aneurysm in his brain." Ugly prognosis. Twenty-fifth Amendment duly cited, brave Ms. Allen is prepared to take the oath. But listen to this Bull Moose: When right-wing Bridges tapped independent Allen as his running mate, he was only covering his demographics; the chief of staff has brought word that Allen is meant to step down so that Bridges can step down so that the speaker of the House, the president's ally, can move on up.

Folks laughed at the line Allen indignantly spoke upon hearing the resignation twist-"And then what? I make a deal with Random House to write a book?"-though that might have been just the hard chuckle of New York knowingness. I found myself, to my mild embarrassment, juiced up by the early scene in which Allen, heading back to a U.S. she at least temporarily runs, moves the Sixth Fleet around as if she were playing Battleship. And when POTUS himself, bedridden in Bethesda, told Allen with his own mouth, "I want-I need you to resign," sharp gasps went up around the audience. With its snazzy quick cuts and unabashedly pulpy vision of Washington, the show had its hooks in by what would have been the second commercial break.

Allen decides to accept her Oval Office destiny after the speaker, one Nathan Templeton, derides her plan to intercede in the execution of a woman in Nigeria. See, there's this convicted adulteress there and, under Islamic law, a planned stoning, and Allen, in the name of human rights, is ready to act with force-unilaterally, even. And in the show's symbolic scheme, poor Nigeria, merely corrupt and ultraviolent in the real world, must pay for the sins of al-Qaeda, too. So it goes: Night Stalker and Invasion let us work off some terror-angst with some paranormal what-not; Commander In Chief lets us fantasize a White House where the president can cleanly stick it to radical Islam and doesn't even have to wear an American flag on her lapel while doing so. The show's villain will be Templeton, played by Donald Sutherland. Ruddy, hammy, magnificently seedy, he makes his threats sound like the seductions of a midnight DJ, and his Machiavelli routine consistently got the crowd's biggest laughs.

Of course, no camera has caught Geena Davis being forceful in a decade, and her performance in the pilot never threatens to disrupt this streak. While the supporting cast lends these proceedings some oomph, she just drifts along weightlessly, and you sit there approving of the niceness in her eyes, admiring her speck of a mole, deciding that the curves of her lips remind you of the TWA Terminal at JFK?. Or maybe you think that Davis is just what the studiously apolitical Commander In Chief needs. She's a blank spot on a write-in ballot.