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From R.D. Heldenfels of the Beacon Journal:

Threesomes become crowd: Latest series about trios of friends basically boring

(webmaster's note: If you read this carefully, you will find some mistakes, which to me proves that he didn't give this show half a chance!)

Tonight completes a TV triple play that once again will make you wonder whether there are any original ideas left in television.

On Monday, NBC premiered House Rules, a situation comedy about three longtime friends, a woman and two men.

Tonight, ABC premieres Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, a comedy about three longtime friends, a woman and two men.

Also tonight, Fox brings on Significant Others, also about three longtime friends, and you can pretty well guess the gender balance. Significant Others claims to be a drama, but it has large amounts of comedy, both deliberate and unintentional.

Indeed, the laughter marks a big way that series creators Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman have veered away from their current success, Party of Five, the usual occupant of the Significant Others time slot. Where the earlier series is very serious about its characters and their plights, Significant Others tries to be more lighthearted, and even in its serious moments is more wistful than somber.

Not that I cared all that much.

The three friends are Campbell (Eion Bailey), Nell (Jennifer Garner) and Henry (Scott Bairstow), all of whom are at a crossroads in their lives and what may or may not be their careers. As the drama begins, Nell and Henry have become romantically attached, which creates complications for both their relationships with Campbell. Campbell is also dealing with the impending marriage of his ex-girlfriend to his brother.

The second episode fleshes out the professional dilemmas facing the three of them -- including Campbell's discomfort with his family's lingerie business, and Nell's tendency to quit good jobs.

And still I didn't care.

Like Party of Five, these characters spend a lot of time talking about their feelings. But entirely too much time, and Campbell in particular has a gift for opening up at exactly the wrong moment. Nor do the pressures on the characters seem all that severe.

Indeed, the show generally seems to be about the lives of 25-year-olds as imagined by 15-year-olds. (There's an unbelievably obvious and exploitative scene in the second episode where all the characters have to learn about the preciousness of life from a neighbor with AIDS.)

And at that, it's still more entertaining than Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. Co-created by Danny Jacobson (Mad About You), the new series tries for a combination of romance and wackiness that seems more labored than amusing. What, for example, are we supposed to do with the pizza place patron who keeps thinking incidents in movies are part of his own life? And how hard are they going to have to work to keep coming up with funny products for one of the guys to test? And who on earth thought this show made a good companion to the edgier, funnier Drew Carey Show? Anyway, the guys are Berg (Ryan Reynolds) and Pete (Richard Ruccolo), graduate students who pick up extra money working in a pizza parlor -- and, in Berg's case, serving as a guinea pig for various products. The girl is Sharon (Traylor Howard), their neighbor and college friend, who has a high-paying job, a BMW and a major attitude problem.

(By the way, if the actors' names in Two Guys . . . and Significant Others don't mean anything to you, they don't mean anything to me, either. I'm more likely to recognize the older supporting characters -- such as David Ogden Stiers and Julius Carry in Two Guys . . . and Richard Masur, Jennifer Savidge and Gigi Rice in Significant Others -- than the young prospects on center stage.)

There are attempts at humor built around Berg's weird jobs, Sharon's hostility and Pete's overly analytical view of his relationship with his occasional girlfriend, Melissa. But talk about straining for a laugh: At one point Pete's testing an asthma inhaler (when he doesn't have asthma), and one of the side effects is that he has to tell the truth, so he ends up telling Melissa a secret Pete has shared.

Anything, I suppose, to get characters to talk about their feelings. But my strongest feeling at this moment is a desire not to watch this show again.

R.D. Heldenfels writes about television for the Beacon Journal. He can be reached at 330-996-3582.

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