Published in The Australian, December 13 2001

Spin City, 8:00pm, Nine (except Perth)

SPIN City has served as a reviver of careers ever since its launch in 1996.

When Michael J. Fox's once-promising career as a movie star stalled after such complete duds as Greedy, Life with Mikey and Doc Hollywood, he returned to the sitcom genre that had propelled him to prominence in the first place.

To minimise the risk of failure, Fox hooked up with Gary David Goldberg, the creator and producer of his earlier comedic hit, Family Ties. Early reports suggested Fox would even reprise his Alex Keaton character from that series.

In the event, New York City deputy mayor Mike Flaherty proved to be a Keaton reshaped to 90s sensibilities: a little less greedy, a little more urban, but still plenty ambitious, and manic enough to allow Fox to display his flair for physical comedy and his immense likeability.

To reinforce the connection, his Family Ties cohorts frequently popped up on the show (dad Michael Gross played a counsellor, mum Meredith Baxter played his mother). Unsubtle, but it worked, and early on, the show managed the unusual trick of being consistently witty rather than just intermittently funny.

More recently, the show provided a handy career boost for Heather Locklear after Melrose Place collapsed in 1999. By taking on the role of wisecracking mayoral aide Caitlin Moore, Locklear achieved the most unlikely of metamorphoses: she managed to leave an Aaron Spelling production and get another permanent role in a show that wasn't produced by Spelling. (Shannen Doherty could learn a lot from Locklear.)

Now Charlie Sheen is hoping lightning will strike three times. With Fox's departure from the series in the wake of his widely publicised battle with Parkinson's disease, Sheen took on the role of the new deputy mayor, a wise guy called Charlie Crawford. Unlike Fox and Lock- lear, however, Sheen has no established track record in TV. This raises the obvious question: can a show built around a sitcom star who moved into movies work with a movie star moving into sitcom territory?

Actually, calling Charlie Sheen a movie star is perhaps a bit of a stretch.

He's appeared in precisely three well-known films (Platoon, Wall Street and Ferris Bueller's Day Off), and the last of those was a cameo. The last time anyone in Australia noticed him would probably have been when he made an appearance in the second series of Friends (as a chicken-pox afflicted sailor beau of Phoebe's), or via an endless series of gossip column reports about his predilection for booze, drugs and hookers. (For that reason, he's doubtless more than a little grateful for his reputed $2.7 million a season paycheck.)

There's nothing really wrong with Mr Sheen's performance: with a little more polish, it should be fine. The bigger problem is that five years in, Spin City is showing definite signs of tiredness. Take the plot of this episode (the sixth of Sheen's first season).

A last-minute plan to include a Native American balloon in New York's annual Thanksgiving Day parade goes awry when the balloon breaks free, loses its costume and reveals its origins as a scantily clad blow-up hooker sourced from a concert tour by Kiss. Meanwhile, the mayor frets because his daughter isn't coming home for Thanksgiving, press assistant Paul lies to his mother about his recent break-up with his wife (who has decided to become a nun), and Locklear rags on Sheen for his preference for dating bimbos. (Wonder where they got that character trait from, eh Charlie?)

None of this is witty or even more than mildly funny. In fact, it smacks of desperation.

While Thanksgiving episodes have never been renowned for their originality, you can tell the show's writers are losing steam when the funniest line of the entire episode is, "I knew you were putting too much helium in those breasts", and the word "agrarian" is used to signify deeply intellectual conversation. Unless the writers have concealed humour columnist Dave Barry in their arsenal of weapons, Spin City isn't likely to attract anyone but its apparently small core group of existing local fans.