"You will believe!" proclaim the promos for the CBS miniseries "Intruders."
Believe in what? In hokey scripts? In silly dialogue? In little gray people from outer space?Unless you come to the series already believing that "They are among us" (as another promo says), it's doubtful you'll walk away convinced of anything but that CBS has concocted an exploitative, bizarre, over-hyped bit of TV junk in the pursuit of big ratings.
CBS is calling this a "fact-based" drama. The "facts" here, however, come from "more than 600 startling case histories" of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
Richard Crenna stars as a high-profile psychiatrist who doesn't believe in the existence of UFOs or aliens. But when he happens to come across a couple of patients (Mare Winningham and Daphne Ashbrook) with startlingly similar stories of abductions by little gray men with big, black eyes, he begins to wonder.
Eventually, he discovers that there are lots of people with similar stories, and he becomes a believer.
The most surprising thing about "Intruders" is simply how dull it is. This story draaaags over two nights and four hours (Sunday and Tuesday from 8-10 p.m. on Ch. 5) without ever raising the level of excitement much above tedium. It doesn't help that half the movie treats it all as some sort of mystery, when every viewer is aware we're talking aliens here.
And while the aliens are portrayed as meanies prone to doing medical experiments on their victims, there's never any sense of terror conveyed.
The only really frightening thing is that, in its promotional material, CBS proclaims how "proud" it is of this miniseries.
Now that's scary.Elsewhere on the tube this weekend:
- SATURDAY: NBC broadcasts Game 1 of the Jazz vs. Blazers Western Conference finals (1:30 p.m., Ch. 2); ABC telecasts horse racing's Preakness Stakes (2:30 p.m., Ch. 4); CBS has taped coverage of Utah's victory at the NCAA women's gymnastics meet (3 p.m., Ch. 5); Mario and the Mob (7 p.m., Ch. 4) is a sitcommy but pleasant TV movie that stars Robert Conrad as a gangster who inherits his late sister's five children; CBS repeats The Color Purple (7 p.m., Ch. 5); Bob Hope (8:30 p.m., Ch. 2) is back with a 90-minute special; former Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy hosts The World's Biggest Lies (8:30 p.m., Ch. 13); The Commish (9 p.m., Ch. 4) wraps up his first season by investigating high school drug dealers; Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams are back as hosts of Comic Relief V (10 p.m., HBO), which will be unscrambled for all cable subscribers; and Woody Harrelson hosts the season finale of Saturday Night Live (11:35 p.m., Ch. 2).
- SUNDAY: The Borg are back on Star Trek: The Next Generation (5 p.m., Ch. 13); World of Discovery (6 p.m., Ch. 4) explores an unspoiled river; America's Funniest Home Videos (7 p.m., Ch. 4) ends its season by giving away $100,000; Murder, She Wrote (7 p.m., Ch. 5) ends its season with the killing of a power-hungry executive; Cruel Doubt (8 p.m., Ch. 2) is the first of an excellent two-part true-crime drama about a Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed 19-year-old who plots to kill his mother and stepfather. It concludes Tuesday. Look Who's Talking (8 p.m., Ch. 4) comes to broadcast TV; and Please Watch the Jon Lovitz Special (8:30 p.m., Ch. 13) features the former "Saturday Night Live" star in a "live" pilot (tape delayed in our area) - a spoof about a baseball star.