Sunday, January 9, 2000

TNN rolls out the drama ‘18 Wheels of Justice’

Take the old series "Knight Rider," change the car into a state-of-the-art 18-wheeler and you've got "18 Wheels of Justice," a new series premiering at 8 p.m. Wednesdayon cable's TNN channel. The one-hour show is the first weekly drama for TNN and it aims directly at an audience of young male viewers who like their plots simple and their machinery noisy.
   Lucky Vanous (best known as the shirtless hunk in Diet Coke commercials) stars as Justice Department agent Michael Cates. In the opening episode, he testifies in the murder-for-hire trial of a vicious crime lord named Jacob Calder (played with an evil sneer by rightwing radio talker G. Gordon Liddy). Calder, sentenced to life in a super-max pen, then puts out a hit on Cates' wife and daughter. Their deaths in a fire that also destroys the family home plunge Cates into despair and force him to enter the witness protection program.
   Renamed Chance Bowman, he goes into hiding, still determined to get revenge on Calder. And here's where the plot gets silly, but no sillier than "Knight Rider's" talking car.
   Bowman's supervisor, Burton Hardesty (played by Billy Dee Williams), orders him to become a long-haul trucker and hands him the keys to the world's most expensive big rig.
   "This truck is your lifeline," Hardesty tells Bowman (who used to be Cates, remember?). "It's a state-of-the-art, high-tech, 18-wheel fortress."
   Equipped with a satellite uplink, in-dash computer with Internet access, infrared night-vision camera, on-board diagnostics and a dashboard that looks like the captain's bridge of the Starship Enterprise, the 7-1/2 ton Kenworth T2000 becomes Bowman's home on wheels.
   As a man without a past, Bowman's only link to his old life and true identity is a pretty mechanic named Cie Baxter (Lisa Thornhill), a tech whiz who communicates with Bowman via those technical marvels inside the truck (yeah, just like Kit on "Knight Rider").
   That's the set-up.
   What happens next is fairly predictable. Forced to drive-drive-drive on one interstate after another, Bowman finds time to solve crimes and battle injustice whenever he pulls off the road for a cup of java.
   Meanwhile, mean-guy Calder is still wreaking havoc from his prison cell and wants Bowman dead.
   Cut to more footage of the truck rolling down the highway.
   So much of this show is taken up with footage of the truck from every conceivable angle that I found time to wonder two things: What the heck is Bowman hauling in the back of this rig? (Cases of Diet Coke perhaps.) And if they cast Lucky Vanous, why didn't they let him show off his famous pecs? It's like casting Pamela Lee and dressing her in choir robes.
   A cheesy thought, I know, but it's just more evidence of who TNN wants watching this show: guys, guys and more guys.
   If they want a crossover audience, however, there's going to have to be more Va-Va-Vanous and fewer aerial shots of the Kenworth.
   The show is certainly a career boost for Vanous, whose bid at stardom after the soda commercials was a role on "Pacific Palisades," a nighttime soap that fizzled.
   Lucky for him, in "18 Wheels of Justice," the truck does most of the acting.
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