If you are looking for young male demographics, why not do your casting for prime-time headliners in beer commercials? That's the core audience for those multimillion-dollar 30-second celebrations of sex, suds and hyper-masculinity, isn't it?

That has to be part of what Fox was thinking when it came up with the concept for Cedric the Entertainer Presents, a new variety show starring Cedric the Entertainer, the heavyset guy in the Bud Light ads who works so hard to get his lady in a romantic mood and then hands her a bottle of beer that explodes in her face. Not exactly my favorite narrative, but you do remember the guy and the beer.

And, so, when I saw Cedric bounce onstage surrounded by the eight dancing ladies known as the Ced-sation dancers at the start of tonight's premiere, I felt like I knew him. Worse, I liked him in an automatic, non-thinking kind of way.

He was familiar to me the way Danny Kaye or Sid Caesar was when I was a kid. And I hated the realization that even media familiarity had become so cheapened in our culture today that it could be manufactured in 30-second bites by the advertising industry - instead of earned by stellar performances on stage, in films and on live television week after week for years and years, as it once was in the era of Kaye, Caesar and Milton Berle.

But let's not blame Cedric for just being au courant. He says he, too, reveres what he calls the "old school" variety performers and that his show is created in their image.

Still, you might have a hard time buying that when you see a member of the troupe shaking her behind in the camera as she slaps it real hard. That's more In Living Color than Carol Burnett, believe me. And, like In Living Color, the half-hour airing tonight is far more sketch comedy than variety.

The first version of the pilot that Fox sent to critics during the summer had more of a variety feel to it. But someone in a network suit decided it had to be jazzed up before it could air, meaning more sketch comedy and bare skin, less music and costly choreography.

I know why the network did it. As a genre, the variety show is dead - has been for about 35 years - and every advertiser in the world knows it. If Moses himself came down the big hill at Universal Studios in California with stone tablets and the first entry said, "Thou shalt bring back the variety show and people shall watch it," it still would not happen. They are too expensive to do right and too easy to tune out with their segmented format. Down and naughty sketch comedy done by a troupe of unknowns is much cheaper than a big musical number or guest star.

Still, there is some variety feel here, especially when Cedric combines music with comedy as he does tonight in his Love Doctor persona, a marriage counselor who looks, dresses and sounds remarkably like Barry White and offers his patients the same kind of "wisdom" White provides in his songs.

To a young couple arguing over a mother-in-law coming to live with them, he says, "What you two are forgetting is that love is and was and ever more shall be. You can't stop love, because what it is just is, and it's everywhere."

He also has a couple of characters in his repertoire that are of Burnett- or Gleason-caliber, like Mrs. Cafeteria Lady, who insults everyone that comes before her school hot lunch counter.

In the end, new series are usually more about business than anything else, and pairing Cedric the Entertainer with a fellow member of The Kings of Comedy franchise, the delightfully cranky Bernie Mac, of The Bernie Mac Show, could do some very good business for Fox on Wednesday nights. The network shouldn't have any trouble attracting beer advertisers anyway. Let's just hope Fox doesn't get greedy and water down the product too much.

Cedric the Entertainer Presents premieres at 8:30 tonight on WBFF (Channel 45).

'Fastlane'

I'll say this for director McG (Charlie's Angels): He fills the screen in Fastlane. The frame is always full of pretty people, sleek cars, young flesh, designer labels, tight clothes and action, action, action.

Unfortunately, this new high-energy cop drama from Fox is also filled with cliches and really bad acting. If there is one original thought in the script or a moment of emotion distilled on-screen in any performance, I missed it. Fastlane might be pretty to look at, but there is absolutely nothing beneath the skin, sin and hectic pace.

Maybe if I put it this way it will help: The most talented actor in the regular cast is Tiffani Thiessen, formerly known as Tiffani-Amber Thiessen before she dropped the Amber to suggest her greater seriousness as an artist. Thiessen plays Billie Chambers, a police detective who puts together a two-man team of undercover cops using money seized from drug dealers to create what she calls "The Candy Store," a theater building filled with designer everything.

The team she puts together in tonight's pilot consists of Van Ray (Peter Facinelli) and Deaqon Hayes (Bill Bellamy). Ray is white, and Hayes black. I point that out because every salt-and-pepper cop team cliche is on ceaseless display.

Detective Ray is recruited by Chambers after his partner gets killed and he gets hustled by a beautiful drug dealer (Jennifer Sky) during what is supposed to be a sting. Hayes, the brother of Ray's dead partner, comes west to Los Angeles to avenge the death and winds up going to work with Ray.

But who cares about such particulars? Watching Ray drive fast cars on Sunset Strip and help hard-bodied young women strip off their clothes is what this series is really about. Ray is the guy with all the screen time in the pilot, and what made it almost unbearable to watch was how shamelessly, desperately, hopelessly he was trying to imitate every Tom Cruise move, look and vocal intonation.

So, you look a little like Cruise, what are you going to do - spend your life being the cheap TV imitation of him? It made me absolutely crazy to watch this hand-me-down performance showcased by McG as if he didn't know he was peddling a two-bit knockoff of a genuine original.

Granted, Thiessen literally cannot walk and speak and stay in character at the same time. I am not exaggerating. Watch closely; when she walks, they do not give her lines to speak. And, yet, I'd rather have her performance than this Tom Cruise wannabe who plays the final big fight scene with his shirt off.

There is no reason for his shirt to be off, since the scene takes place at dawn and it is supposed to be chilly standing there on the beach. At least that's the way the woman standing with him is playing it.

But like I said, who cares about such particulars?

Fastlane premieres at 9 tonight on WBFF (Channel 45).

'The Twilight Zone'

At a time when TV is doing a lot of looking back, a new edition of The Twilight Zone looks back the furthest - to a series that first aired more than 40 years ago. In the interim, the suspense genre has been worked to death, possibly inuring us to the razor-sharp simplicity of Rod Serling's classic.

UPN's 2002 version opens with two stories that gamely attempt to recapture the pleasures of a tightly wound creep-out. The second piece, "One Night at Mercy," is far more successful than the first, "Evergreen," whose trajectory is both too familiar (from TV and the movies) and too out of it (in contrast to real life) to create legitimately chilling moments.

The Winslows decide to move to a gated community in the hopes of reining in their punked-out daughter (Amber Tamblyn). In the vein of The Stepford Wives and the teen film Disturbing Behavior, the rules are extreme, and the consequences even more so: The kids all wear uniforms, the presence of authority is low-key yet constant and unyielding, the place is way too green. But we've seen it all before, including a twist that arrives with a plop.

Thank "Mercy," then, and Jason Alexander (as the Grim Reaper himself) for proving that we haven't become too jaded. The premise has a boiled-down, Zone-worthy essence: What if after 4 billion years on the job, Death decided to call it quits? The former Seinfeld star is convincing in the larger-than-life role, creating a menacing character you can sympathize with, in part because of his grim sense of humor.

- Manuel Mendoza /The Dallas Morning News