Ringer

The pilot was extremely plot-heavy, so we've got our fingers crossed that future episodes will tone down the action and dig deeper into the characters.

Sarah Michelle Gellar returns to TV Tuesday night in a show that could be a lot of soapy fun, but may require more work than some TV viewers will want to put in.

Ringer is at times cleverly handled, suggesting numerous plot avenues for the future. Unfortunately, Gellar's wooden performance in the premiere episode doesn't bode well.

Ringer is nearly all melodramatics, but the pilot has a throwback, B-movie vibe that's entertaining--empty calories, but with a little kick.

It's inert, lackluster and a trifle old-fashioned. Even the action scenes feel geriatric. It's also vaguely silly--a big reason the venerable good twin/evil twin gambit is better suited to comedy than drama.

Tuesday's premiere certainly has enough intrigue for starters. What it needs is more overall electricity.

OK, so I'm having a real problem with the idea that Bridget could get away with this switch for even one second. If you can look past that, you'll still have to deal with a story so dense it takes a couple long expositional scenes to explain it all.

Adopting a kitchen-sink approach, Ringer dumps out so many bread crumbs at the outset it's hard not to wonder where they might lead.

Barring a significant step up in quality--or at least the self-awareness to stop taking its silly plot and characters so seriously--those people [Gen X'ers who loved "Buffy"] will only be watching out of loyalty to a part that Gellar played a long time ago, on two different networks that no longer exist, and not because she's presently doing work that merits that kind of devotion.

I'll admit that between the CW and ABC Family, I'm having trouble keeping track of the duos who've been separated at birth, switched at birth, given up at birth and in the case of Ringer, apparently just found themselves drifting apart into different worlds, but by halfway through tonight's pilot, I felt as if I'd seen this one before.

It's an oxymoron: a show about identity theft with no personality.

If the story-through-backstory becomes more compelling, and in the process Bridget and Siobhan become well-enough developed to give Gellar something to do, Ringer might turn around. So far, though, it's just twice as much of a disappointing thing.

Though handsomely assembled from the spare parts of a dozen other evil-twin stories that came before it, Ringer quickly downgrades itself to a fairly ho-hum night soap.

Ringer isn't terrible. But it's less than it could be, and it has yet to present viewers with compelling reasons for putting up with its contrivances.