Ron Stringer

What's most disturbing about this ineptly scripted, utterly implausible (and at the same time curiously likable) comedy of sin and redemption in TV's home-shopping universe is how close a committed cast and a talented director (Stephen Herek, late of Mr. Holland's Opus) come to pulling it off, to making us feel good about the 110 minutes or so we've just pissed away.

Doesn't offer much new in the way of news or analysis. What it does offer is inspiration from an unlikely source, via an unsparing look at one such victim.

While decidedly green, at least isn't mealy or tasteless. And if the juice in tyro screenwriter Erica Beeney's witty dialogue can't quite flow through the hard tissue of underripe gimmicks and derivative set pieces, there's enough sweetness in the performances, and tautness in the direction (by Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin), to forestall any serious bellyaching.

Turgid, melodramatic travesty of Thackeray's gimlet-eyed satire.

To no one's possible satisfaction -- the non-question of how Paige is to ascend to the throne and retain her personal integrity that The Prince and Me falls, finally and irrevocably, flat.

They have succeeded in establishing conservative ideologue Ken Starr as one of American prosecutorial history's biggest heels and Clinton loyalist Susan McDougal as a bona fide hero and martyr. The problem, of course, is that the president himself was neither, and no amount of hand wringing -- however justified -- can make him one.

A good horse kick, or a fistful of Valium, may help you get through this relentlessly sadistic exercise with your soul more or less intact.

Let horses be horses, scrap the tin-eared Lukas Haas narration.

The final revelation which, however anticipated, however contrived, stings just enough to make it feel like life.

Fails in so many respects, even die-hard constituents may have trouble learning to like it.

Unfortunately, the innovations that attend this updating dilute the iconic weight of the original.

Bad photography, bad acting and bad dialogue.

An exquisite metaphor for the high cost and higher returns of an enduring marriage.

Those seeking anything resembling a real discussion of the issues had best seek elsewhere.

Not to mention the good-when-moody, best-when-raucous art-band soundtrack!

A fine cast of unknowns in a story of faith -- lost, found and continually challenged -- that neither romanticizes nor condescends to its milieu.

It's a prolonged, maddening, predictable -- yet curiously pleasurable -- descent into incomprehensibility.

The problem for director Keith Gordon is that Potter's script pares down to virtual nothing the very narrative threads that allowed us, in the full-length version, to identify with his prickly protagonist, and knocks us upside the head with a hyperkinetic, disorienting first act from which audiences -- especially those approaching this material cold -- are unlikely to recover.

While your personal estimation of this conservative counterprogrammer will depend largely on your politics, Chetwynd and company at least attempt to score their points honestly.