'Standoff' is a big turn-off

At least Fox's new series "Standoff" is trying to give us value for the time we invest watching it — it's two shows in one.

It's a taut police thriller. It's a wacky romantic comedy.

And that's the problem. It's hard to be both of those things at the same time. Pretty much impossible, if Tuesday's series premiere (7 p.m., Ch. 13) is any indication.

Matt Flannery (Ron Livingston) and Emily Lehman (Rosemarie DeWitt) are great at their jobs. They're negotiators for the FBI's Crisis Negotiation Unit.

And they've got a couple of interesting things to deal with —a distraught father with a gun and a terrorist wannabe with a bomb.

In the middle of the first incident, however, Matt suddenly reveals to the distraught father and the rest of the world that he's having an affair with Emily. And any sense of reality the show had going for it walks right out the door.

It's not just that "Standoff" plays a bit like Lucy and Ricky Join the Police, it's that neither element of the show works particularly well. The police stuff looks like cop show-by-the-numbers. And the romantic comedy stuff is neither particularly romantic nor particularly comedic.

It doesn't help that Livingston and DeWitt don't seem to have much in the way of chemistry in the first episode, either.

"Standoff" isn't awful. But it hardly seems worth investing an hour of your life in, either.

LOTS OF CRITICS are just wild about "House." I've never been one of them.

I never disliked the show, by any means. I think that Hugh Laurie is great as the chronically cantankerous Dr. House, whose genius at diagnosing patients is exceeded only by his self-awareness of his genius.

But I've never quite bought into the show, which always seemed too much of the writers trying to prove how clever and funny they are and too little about creating believable characters.

Maybe that's changing. Tuesday's third-season premiere (7 p.m., Ch. 13) is taking the show in a bit of a different direction. It seems that, having been shot and nearly dying at the end of last season, House is almost a changed man.

Oh, he's still a jerk. But he's pain-free (at least for now) after years of constant suffering, and it's given him a new perspective.

As always, there's an interesting case for him to work on. As always, there are colleagues for him to fight with. And, as always, House is the smartest and most obnoxious one in the room.

Maybe he's human, after all.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com