By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Unlike a little knowledge, a little talent is not a dangerous thing. Then again, danger might be preferable to boredom.

Frank Caliendo, a round young comic with a following of Internetters and sports fans, has been given his own series on the TBS cable network but doesn't know quite what to do with it. As a result, "Frank TV," premiering tonight, has a strange, timid, cloudy countenance that is too cold to be warmed up to.

Caliendo's gift is mimicry. He does expert impressions of major pop-culture and political figures -- expert but not inspired, the way longtime cast member Darrell Hammond's are on "Saturday Night Live." Hammond could be considered the impressionist laureate of the United States; his incomparable satirical portraits are not only amusing but defining. When Caliendo tries to duplicate Hammond's specialties -- Dick Cheney or Sean Connery -- he's doing an impression of an impression and comes across as third-handed at best.

Besides inspiration, Hammond has another certain something that Caliendo lacks: material. Only on occasion do Caliendo's jokes -- his and eight other writers' -- match the quality of his vocal choreography. As Cheney, he notes sourly that one of his daughters is a lesbian, but only "until they find a cure." One or two such zingers, however, don't justify dragging the Cheney impression well past a manageable length.

Caliendo does a better President Bush than anybody on "Saturday Night Live," where not even Hammond has been able to come up with a funny and artful caricature. Executive producer Lorne Michaels has said that "SNL" doesn't do many Bush sketches anymore because "that show is kind of over." But Caliendo gets a few solid laughs in the role, as when Bush haltingly notes, "You know I'm not good with [long, long pause] . . . words."

And to stay on a positive track for as long as possible, Caliendo brings off a tour de force near the beginning of tonight's premiere when he plays all the parts -- Jerry, George, Kramer, Elaine, Newman -- in a visualization of a 20th-anniversary "Seinfeld" special. The sketch even has a point of view; it reminds us how over-the-top virtually every actor on the show got to be, especially as the end drew nigh.

"Frank TV" is structured to resemble "SCTV" more than "Saturday Night Live." Caliendo introduces the sketches from a sitcomic living-room set. As with "SCTV," which presented some of the sharpest sketch comedy in TV history, Caliendo's show plays with what-if premises: What if Donald Trump did one of those get-rich-quick infomercials that play at 4 a.m. on cable TV channels? The answer to that one unfortunately turns out to be: "Nothing very funny would happen."

So it is with another contrivance -- like the Trump sketch, also from next week's show -- answering the rhetorical question that should have remained rhetorical, "What if Al Pacino and Robert De Niro did a movie-critic show like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel used to do?" In their long-ago heyday, Siskel and Ebert were actually wittier than Caliendo's pointless impressions of Pacino and De Niro are.

A TBS spokeswoman says that five "Frank TV" shows have been taped and that when those run out, unless the Writers Guild strike has ended, the current run will end. Of course it might have ended anyway even if the strike had never materialized -- ended, that is, the old-fashioned way, with ratings failure. Under the circumstances, with David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and others off the air, Caliendo may be the beneficiary of desperation viewing by the comedy-starved.

At least it's not a rerun, even if it sometimes seems like one.

Caliendo, best known for his impression of sports commentator John Madden, really isn't ready for his own show, and his omnipresence is kind of depressing; he looks so lonely out there. Sensing this, the producers concocted a gimmick in which Caliendo selects a supposedly random soul from the studio audience to be his co-host for the episode. It doesn't help Caliendo's cause when the co-hosts prove fitfully more personable than he is.

Technically, this is a half-hour show -- but preview editions, which do not contain commercial breaks, ran just 20 minutes. Thus "Frank TV" seems reminiscent of the old joke Woody Allen popularized about two women at a Catskills resort complaining about the food. One says, "It tastes terrible," and the other grouches, "Yes, and such small portions."

Caliendo's "Frank TV" is as meek and bland, really, as Clark Kent, "mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper." Unfortunately, no matter how many people the star becomes, neither he nor the show ever turns into Superman.

Frank TV (30 minutes) premieres tonight at 11 on TBS.