Law show 'Hayes' guilty of mediocrity

"TV's most intense actor is back," proclaims a critical blurb. The word "intense" is great to use as a helpless filler where no other epithets apply, and this case is no exception. David Caruso's acting style is, first and foremost, so perfectly blah (perhaps "transparent" is the word) that he comes across as a near-genius in good hands and as a hack elsewhere. Which helps explain both his phenomenal success in Steven Bochco's "NYPD Blue" - and the speedy demise of his movie career, where Caruso served time as a mouthpiece for lines penned by Joe Eszterhaus.

So he is back indeed, greeted by a collective "we told you so" from the always helpful press. On "Michael Hayes," a new CBS crime drama, Caruso is playing a New York City district attorney as opposed to a street cop; but the pilot episode is quick to establish the titular Hayes' past occupation as a policeman, lest we forget who we're dealing with.

"Yeah, I'm back on TV. Wanna make somethin' of it?" The Great Caruso returns in CBS' "Michael Hayes."

It's hard to forget, too: Hayes projects a very familiar kind of slow-burning ambition and general uneasy knottiness. The pilot has him watching the details of a decade-old murder resurface in a case of a Mob underling. The catch is, the underling has decided to cooperate - and if he is convicted of this particular horror (raping and killing a teen-age Catholic waitress while she clutched her rosary) - the cops lose a good lead to his bosses.

Hayes plunges into the case headfirst, with nicely hushed obsessiveness that is Caruso's specialty, and immediately makes a roomful of enemies out of cops whose work he is effectively screwing up. Does a key witness appear in the last 10 minutes to straighten the mess out? Ten guesses.

Director Peter Weller can't resist the temptation to spruce up the story with shots of moodily lit Caruso in variously incongruous NYC locales (was that the Metropolitan steps? come on), fingering the dead girl's rosary. But all in all, any TV drama can use a good portion of moodiness. The problem is, "Michael Hayes" leaves Caruso a lone ranger.

We're talking about an actor so subdued that he physically can't exist on TV except as a straight man to a wilder, woollier character; in other words, an Andy Sipowicz. The closest "Michael Hayes" comes to the winning "NYPD" dynamic is providing Michael with an obligatory don't-go-there sidekick delivering lines like "You're making this personal. Never make it personal!" Uh, thank you - but that's precisely not what we want to see. We want Caruso to make it so personal as to shed all of his quiet reserve and tear through the damn story like Al Pacino in heat - I mean, in "Heat" - because nothing else will help it. And so far, sad to say, nothing does.

09-23-97