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'Pearl'

It takes awhile to send Pearl Caraldo off to school, but once she gets there, whoopee! That's when "Pearl" turns into a surprise, a hoot, a delight, one of the best-written and most engagingly performed new sitcoms around.

The premiere, at 8:30 tonight on Channel 9, starts out hesitantly. We meet Pearl, as played by the ever-spunky Rhea Perlman, and spend time at her very uninteresting workplace, replete with stock characters like a big fat dumb guy. There's also a brief appearance by quirky Carol Kane, who then vanishes into the mist.

Pearl's a widow who is not satisfied with her life and decides to return to college, over the protests of her spoiled male-chauvinist son. The minute she shows her flinty face on campus, things start looking up. First she meets Frankie (Kevin Corrigan), a winsome kid who's off the wall in his own endearing way.

"I'm looking for a beautiful woman with severely impaired judgment," he says.

But the comic and emotional center of the show is Pearl's relationship with the school's toughest professor, played by Malcolm McDowell. The conflict here is between the street-smart common sense of Pearl and the hoity-toity intellectualism of the teacher, but Don Reo's script does not take the easy route of giving Pearl all the victories. Not by a long shot.

McDowell gets plenty of good lines and makes them crackle, as when he defines an intellectual as "someone who can listen to the 'William Tell' Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger." He and Perlman are joyful combatants; some of their scenes run on to daring but never taxing lengths. The chemistry is ecstatically explosive.

Though less caustic than she was on "Cheers," Perlman is again playing a formidable force not to be trifled with, and that makes her occasional moments of vulnerability and self-doubt all the more touching. McDowell, who at this point in his life looks something like a lab experiment gone awry, gives his character dignity and integrity. He's no pushover and no easy target.

"Pearl," to state the obvious, is a gem -- one of the saving graces of a sallow and shallow new season.