It isn't easy to pick the worst new show of the fall season - there are so many to choose from.
"Uncle Buck" is garbage. "Going Places" is dreadful. And if you were to add "Ferris Bueller" and "Parker Lewis" together you still couldn't come up with one show that could even achieve mediocrity.But perhaps the most atrocious program to be foisted upon the viewing audience is "E.A.R.T.H. Force."
We're talking absolute stinker here.
Bad writing. Bad acting. Bad directing. "E.A.R.T.H. Force" has it all.
About the only good thing about this show are its intentions - to raise the environmental consciousness of viewers. But it's so atrocious those viewers might want to run out and burn down a rain forest or dump acid in a river in protest.
The premise is this: A multi-billionaire who hasn't exactly worried about the environment suddenly has a crisis on his hands. Naturally, he has his beautiful assistant (Joanne Pacula) round up a team of experts from the four corners of the globe.
Gil Gerard ("Buck Rogers") plays the leader, a medical doctor. The Force also includes and oceanographer (Tiffany Lamb) a nuclear physicist (Clayton Rohner) and - but of course - a mercenary soldier (Stewart Finlay-McClennan).
Together they form the "Earth Alert Research Tactical Headquarters."
In the pilot, which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Ch. 5, a nuclear power plant has been sabotaged by terrorists and is on the verge of a meltdown. In the final seconds before this disaster, one member of the Force saves the world by pounding on the reactor's control rods with a fire extingusher.
Now, I'm not a nuclear physicist. But this came off as so incredibly hokey and unbelievable it was ludicrous.
And, even worse, there was still about half of the two-hour pilot left to go.
You can almost feel sorry for the poor actors, stuck doing this kind of junk.
Not that "E.A.R.T.H. Force" was completely without fun moments. I started rooting for the bad guy to shoot down the Force's helicopter a later in the program.
And when a character died at the end of the show, I began calculating how many weeks the show would last if they killed off a character in every episode.
Chances are, it won't even last that long.