If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the new CBS series "Kate Brasher" must at least be in purgatory by now.
This show is just loaded with good intentions. Too bad it's not good.
Mary Stuart Masterson stars as the title character, a 34-year-old single mother of two teenage boys (Mason Gamble and Gregory Smith) who's struggling to make ends meet. Heck, she's struggling to keep from being evicted from her apartment.
As the show (Saturday, 8 p.m., Ch. 2) opens, she's working as a waitress. And she's doing double duty by cleaning a bowling alley — a job for which she and a bunch of other women are stiffed on their pay.
Which sends her in the direction of something called Brother's Keeper, a sort of community center that offers help to the less fortunate.
And then the cliches start coming thick and fast. Rhea Perlman ("Cheers") is the obnoxious, feisty lawyer with a heart of gold. (Hers is the most cartoonish character, and her husband — Danny DeVito — is one of the show's executive producers!) Hector Elizondo ("Chicago Hope") is the center's street-smart director, who went into this line of work when his teenage daughter was accidentally killed in a drive-by gang shooting.
The director stands up to local developers, who are portrayed as — you guessed it! — evil, money-grubbing exploiters. The lawyer helps Kate stand up to that bowling-alley owner — an evil, money-grubbing exploiter.
There's nothing in the pilot episode that doesn't work out the way you expect. Kate's elder son gets involved in gambling? Her younger son calls his long-absent father looking for help? What, do you think the former is going to get his kneecaps busted or the latter is going to find out that dear old Dad is really a great guy?
And, after the story spends a lot of time introducing the center and its staff, the center offers Kate a job and she declines. So, what do you think happens by the end of the episode?
(Without giving away one of the show's few "surprises," Kate gets that job offer because of an encounter she has with a woman at the center that's so over-the-top you have to laugh — or you'll cry about just how bad the writing is.)
To be clear, "Kate Brasher" is the sort of show I really, really wanted to like. It's a drama that pushes family values, community service — even religion, in a way.
(Although Kate's form of religion seems to consist of flipping through the Bible and randomly selecting verses.)
But the whole thing is so heavy-handed and cliched that its message is lost. It's about as realistic as an episode of "Touched by an Angel."
It's possible to promote values without beating your audience over the head with them. It's possible to present realistic situations and characters that build drama and make you think.
But none of that happened in "Kate Brasher." Which is too bad.
THE BOSS'S WIFE: CBS is promoting "Kate Brasher" as being from the people who brought us the Oscar-nominated film "Erin Brockovich" — which is true, sort of.
Both are produced by Jersey Films — "Brasher" is the production company's first television project. And both share some executive producers (DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher), none of whom are involved in the day-to-day production of the series.
But Perlman, at least, is happy about working for a company her husband's a partner in.
"Well, all I can say is, you know, 30 years of sleeping with the guy — I finally got into the ground floor of Jersey television," she joked.
And she doesn't seem particularly worried about sort of working for DeVito.
"It's like in any new relationship — you've got to give each other space and just learn how to work it out," Perlman said.
She is not, however, an executive at Jersey.
"Me? No, I'm not," Perlman said. "I'm a wife."
E-MAIL: pierce@desnews.com