Love, Death and Déjà vu

Time is the essence as well of UPN's Seven Days, in which Jonathan LaPaglia, look-alike brother of Murder One's Anthony and former New York Undercover cop, is enabled by Roswellian alien technology to go back in time seven days in order to retroactively pre-empt terrorist disturbances of the peace -- it's a paranoid version of Early Edition. As befits a series about a man who goes around and around in time, the déjà vu is nearly blinding. We have been here before, fresh paint and fresh faces notwithstanding, in these secret underground chambers manned by silent guards and stuffed with sparky machines, out in the field saving the life of the president, heading off World War III, isolating a world-devouring virus. It took no time at all to get around to the old split personality/evil twin routine, seen with little variation from Star Trek to The Secret World of Alex Mack. The supporting cast, meanwhile, could have been lifted whole out of any of a hundred action films: Meet (again) the wise-owl project director, the thick-spectacled scientist, the naysaying blowhard and the sexy but brilliant superbabe -- in this case, a defected Eastern-bloc egghead played by Justina Vail, whom those with no life may remember as a vampire on a second-season X-Files. And LaPaglia is just the latest avatar of a hero whose incarnations run from John Wayne through Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson: individual, unconventional, preternaturally self-possessed and yet perhaps a little mad -- as with Cupid's Piven, we first discover him in a booby hatch, where he won't take his medicine and is reading The Idiot. He's trouble, but they need him, damn it.

But like Brimstone, Seven Days makes a much more enjoyable hour than its specs might seem to promise, primarily because of LaPaglia's so-cool-he's-hot, so-hot-he's-cool star turn, and a determination not to take its mission too seriously. The show has little to say past that your government is working hard to keep you safe from apocalypse -- a weekly business, apparently -- but not so hard there's not room to joke and, more important, to flirt. It's all rather reassuring, really. Pass the popcorn.

CUPID
ABC
Saturdays, 10 p.m.; Thursdays, 9 p.m., after January 7

BRIMSTONE
Fox
Fridays, 8 p.m.

SEVEN DAYS
UPN
Wednesdays, 8 p.m.