Crash

Gritty, jarring, profane and smartly produced.

The show clearly wants to say something complicated about race and class in Los Angeles, but a number of the situations and characters on the show feel like situations and people we’ve seen before (starting with the movie that lends the series its name).

I’ll come back to Crash the TV show, but for now, the acting doesn’t exactly induce gaper’s block.

They're a largely unlikable lot of crooked cops, adulterers and Hopper's long-winded, nutso music mogul. It's one thing to spend a movie with these characters, but it's quite another to tune in for 13 weeks.

The new drama Crash struggles mightily to appear slick and sophisticated and special, but the whole elaborate mess is just as leaden and obvious as the Oscar-winning movie upon which it's based.

The racial fire is oddly muted, the characters disturbingly undefined, the interaction frustratingly nondescript. The truth is, I'm not really sure what this show is supposed to be other than chaotic and boorish

Messy at best, the two-episode premiere suffers from wildly uneven performances, beginning with Dennis Hopper at his manic worst.