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Brooke Shields, Suddenly Snoozin'

She gets her dress torn off, she falls off a bar stool, she tumbles into a hamper, she smokes a cigar, she goes wild and wacky at a karaoke bar. Brooke Shields does everything but hang by her teeth from the Golden Gate Bridge on the premiere of "Suddenly Susan," but at best her shenanigans are merely diverting.

That may be all NBC needs, since the new sitcom, premiering at 9:30 tonight on Channel 4, occupies the happy hallowed ground between "Seinfeld" and "ER" on Thursdays (although "ER" is preempted tonight by the premiere of "The Pretender"). Shields certainly works hard and seems less blankly bland than usual, but it's not enough. The show isn't worth the time of night.

To start things off, Susan skips out on her wedding to a man who refers to himself as "a handsome rich guy" and high-tails it back to the Gate, a San Francisco magazine where she once worked as a copy editor. Instead of giving Susan her old job back, the editor (irritating Judd Nelson), who happens to be the brother of the man she jilted, asks, "How would you like to write your own column?"

Shields doesn't look like she could write a check, much less a column, but after a night on the town with friends, Susan realizes her life isn't as uneventful as she thought. Shields does a funny twist on Mary Tyler Moore's "You're Gonna Make It After All" and has several ingratiating moments as she cavorts about a bar.

At the office, though, the requisite zany co-workers are trotted out one at a time, like fridges and Fords on "The Price Is Right," each one seeming to have sprung from the pages of a stock sitcom character catalogue. Vicki is snotty and Todd is love-struck and Luis is a romantic Hispanic, and so on. This one's like this and that's one like that and if you can manage to care, you're either very charitable or you're a helpless slave to the cathode ray.

Barbara Barrie adds some weight and class as Susan's nana, but, it might be noted, she is called upon to utter the new favored naughty word of sitcom writers this season: "wank." Also, she looks a bit insulted to be playing second fiddle to the semi-talented Shields, as she should be.

When Nelson, from the editor's desk, exclaims to the heroine, "Suddenly, Susan, you're interesting," many's the viewer who'll feel like responding, "Wanna bet?"