03/19/2001

By / The Dallas Morning News

FIRST YEARS Grade: D Time: 8 p.m. Mondays, NBC (Channel 5). Starring: Samantha Mathis, Mackenzie Astin, Ken Marino, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, James Roday. Created by Jill Gordon. 60 min. THIS LIFE Grade: A Time: 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, BBC America; moves to 9:30 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays starting March 26. Starring: Jack Davenport, Daniella Nardini, Amita Dhiri, Jason Hughes, Andrew Lincoln. Created by Amy Jenkins. 60 min.

TELEVISION

The recent British drama series This Life opened with a layered set piece built around confessions from its young-lawyer characters. Though two of them were at job interviews and a third was in therapy, you couldn't tell at first.

That wasn't important – what they were saying about themselves was intriguing enough, even if it wasn't totally clear what they were talking about. This Life was calmly and deliberately setting the stage for a textured look at the ambitions of Generation X.

Cut to First Years, a new American drama based loosely – very loosely – on This Life. It opens with Samantha Mathis hyperbolically worrying about the size of her backside and wondering when and how she's going to find a man.

Kerplunk!

American television used to know how to translate this kind of thing: Till Death Do Us Part beget All in the Family. Steptoe and Son beget Sanford and Son. Lately, not so much.

First Showtime went over the top with its adaptation of Queer as Folk, and now NBC has sucked the life out of This Life. Flat and obvious where This Life was expansive and suggestive, First Years is as linear and literal-minded as its title.

Take, for instance, each show's first court case.

The homeless woman represented by Milly in This Life – which is being repeated on the digital-cable channel BBC America beginning Tuesday – was no victim. Even after much scratching of her gritty exterior, she's still deeply flawed. Just because she sleeps on the street doesn't mean she has to turn out to be nice or noble or wise.

In First Years, a jailed woman is nothing but. As she struggles to decide whether to give her child up for adoption, you already know what she'll do in the end.

And the problems aren't just by comparison. In fact, if you've never seen This Life, you'll probably wonder why NBC bothered to air what amounts to a half-baked legal series. The cases aren't compelling, the people aren't interesting.

A couple of promising actors get lost in the shuffle, particularly Sidney Poitier's daughter, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, whose ease in front of the camera is undermined by her PC role as the show's conscience. And another acting scion, Mackenzie Astin (son of John Astin, The Addams Family's original Gomez), is wasted as Warren, the gay outsider.

Actor-director Eric Schaeffer (My Life's in Turnaround, If Lucy Fell) also shows potential as the lawyers' strange mentor.

But because it's driven by plot instead of characterization, First Years is an inside-out version of This Life. And what plots. In the premiere, the jailbird is joined by the ex-wife of an associate whose new husband-to-be left her at the altar. Hijinks ensue.

Then in the second episode, the lawyers, who live and work together, have to deal with, like, a pair of teen queens who run girlsrule.com and are being sued by their nerdy former partner. As they walk into the firm, both are speaking into a same cell phone.

The lawyers don't fare any better with each other, either.

Key to This Life were the complicated, sometimes contradictory relationships between Milly and her longtime boyfriend, Egg; between Anna and Miles, who slept together once in college and haven't gotten over it; and between Warren, who's gay, and the world.

Warren opened This Life with a lovely and indirect speech. By the time First Years' version surfaces, it's been riddled with cliches.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll puke.

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