Cruise Control

As pleasant company as these players are, the series they’ve landed in seem weightless and unnecessary. More engaging, though far from perfect, is That‘s Life (the imperfections begin with the meaningless title), which stars Heather Paige Kent (Jenny, Stark Raving Mad) as a Jersey girl who ditches her mook fiance in favor of college, against the advice of her family and friends. Though it batters its better self with improbabilities and cliches and a tendency to get icky-sentimental in the clinches, it is not without its affecting moments and clever conceits (Kent and pop Paul Sorvino have their heart-to-hearts while she passes through the New Jersey Turnpike toll booth where he works; she’s a bartender who does all the talking, the better to narrate by), and the hour passes happily.

The nominal heart of the show itself, the back-to-school stuff and the will toward self-improvement, we have met elsewhere; recently, it formed the precise substance of Pearl, Rhea Perlman‘s failed comedy of a few seasons back, down to the protagonist’s prickly relations with a snootyscary English professor (which is not to say, in this case, a professor of English), played there by Malcolm McDowell and here by Peter Firth, a long way from the days he was getting naked as the young star of Equus. Firth overacts extravagantly, though Sorvino and Ellen Burstyn (of all people) as her parents, and Kevin Dillon as her brother, and much of the rest of the cast chew their share of scenery. The whole show‘s a little overripe, with its Italian cheese-pop and sensitive-rock sounds clogging the soundtrack, and its Sopranos-lite north Jersey dialect -- it’s friggin‘ this and friggin’ that -- but it works, largely because Kent keeps it tethered to recognizable ordinary life. Though I found her at first notably less convincing than Debi Mazar -- back on TV in a best-friend supporting role after her own shot at top-lining Temporarily Yours (with Bette‘s Joanna Gleason) and focused to the tips of her painted fingernails -- I am convinced now. ”You’re real. You‘re not one of these passionless clones,“ a smitten young classmate told her a couple of weeks back, and though he didn’t seem real at all, this sensitive guitar-playing type, nor did his remark, her reality was enough for the both of them. And for me.