(ABC, Thursday, 9,00)

I'll admit: before the season started, before I had seen one new show, before I had even read all the one-lines from the upfronts, I had already decided that Big Shots was going to be my favorite new show. I mean, what could you not like about a show staring Dylan McDermot (The Practice), Christopher Titus (Titus, stand-up comic), Michael Vartan (Alias), and Joshua Malina (Sports Night, The West Wing). With a cast like that, how could you go wrong, I thought.

But just like I was wrong when I prejudged Dirty Sexy Money, I was wrong when I predjudged Big Shots. I'm sorry to inform, it's not very good. All three men are CEOs of nig corporations, dealing with all of the problems that being super-rich and power entails. So, to hit them quickly:

McDermott has a daughter who's snotty who he's trying to get to know better and a problem with a magazine profile and a tranny hooker.

Titus has a wife that's a shrew. A terrible, terrible shrew.

Malina's got a nice wife, but he's cheating on her with a bimbo. He feels bad because the bimbo is done, but when he tries to end it, before he can, the bimbo decides to go to the wife as pose as an interior designer that he hired.

Vartan genuinely gets the short end of the stick: his wife was cheating on him. With his boss. The boss that was going to fire him. The first thing that goes right for Vartan is the fact that he finds this out at the boss' funeral. And then he gets picked to be CEO on the basis of a nice speech that he gives because of that. ("You can hire someone with a sterling resume, who's never failed at anything they've tried. But you'd be bettr served hiring someone who's lost something. Because he'll make damn sure it never happens again.")

So we feel bad for Vartan. Not so bad for Malina. Or McDermott. The guys seems pretty genuinely slimy, if generally well-intentioned. Titus, despite his shrew-wife hating, seems pretty solid. And Vartan seems like a good guy, but still. The show's got no... life, no anima. Nothing to make it go. No heart, for lack of a better word. It feels like a calculated Desperate Housewives ripoff aimed at men, and because of that, it's got less camp than DH did (but just about every show does, to be fair).

That said, this probably makes it a pretty good match for Grey's Anatomy, which it follows: pretty people doing silly things, but nice and light to fill the 9,00 hour after the melodramatic soup of Grey's.

Big Shots. ABC, Thursday, 9,00. C.