Pretty pictures are not enough to make a hit

There's a lesson to be learned from the failure of NBC's computer-animated "Father of the Pride" — a show that looks great isn't the same as a show that is great.

"Pride," from the animation geniuses at DreamWorks who brought us the "Shrek" movies, looked great. There's no argument about that. The animation process was a step — several steps — above what we've become accustomed to on television.

But it wasn't enough. The show, which was endlessly promoted during NBC's coverage of the Olympics in August and launched with all the hoopla and fanfare the network could muster, never attracted a whole lot of viewers. To date, it has averaged about 9.5 million viewers per episode, which isn't many considering how expensive the animation process is.

"Frasier," which was limping through its final season a year ago, averaged more than 12 million viewers per episode in the same Tuesday-at-8 p.m. time slot.

The problem was that this show about a family of lions who performed in Siegfried and Roy's Las Vegas show just wasn't very good. Oh, it had its moments, but not enough moments to add up to half-hour of decent TV viewing. (It probably didn't help that the pilot was loaded with sexual innuendo, turning off viewers — at least the ones who made the mistake of letting their kids watch it — from the get-go.)

The failure of "Father of the Pride" was entirely predictable. As a matter of fact, it was predicted right here, because — despite the pretty pictures the program presented — there was nothing inside the wrapping for viewers to hold on to.

It was the animation equivalent of hiring a Really Big Star to headline a new series and only then worrying about what that series will be. And, more often than not, the resulting show proves to be an embarrassment to the Really Big Star because it's bad. And it bombs.

It's not like "Father of the Pride" is the first time this sort of thing has happened. Back in 1991, ABC introduced a really cool looking show called "Dinosaurs" that took animatronics to a whole new level. But as great as it looked, what it boiled down to was a mundane, uninspired family sitcom. Despite ABC's best efforts, the show never caught on with viewers.

More recently — just nine months ago, as a matter of fact — UPN put on a cool-looking show of its own. "Game Over" was designed to look like a video game and featured a family of characters who lived like they were characters in a video game. But it was dopey and boring. And the "Game" was "Over" quite quickly.