Thank Goodness It's Friday

"How strange a work of providence is the life of man." That's the first line in NBC's glossy new version of Daniel Dafoe's classic castaway tale, "Robinson Crusoe," but it could just as equally apply to Ben Silverman, NBC's head of entertainment who has somehow managed to stay employed as the network's already tenuous ratings position slips further. Silverman apparently has a craving for the classics, hence his decision to greenlight "Crusoe" and Christian Slater's series "My Own Worst Enemy" (a play on Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".) There's also "Kings," which will bow this winter, a modernization of David and Goliath. ("Crusoe" will be on Fridays at 8: p.m.; "Enemy" is on Mondays at 8 p.m.)

"Crusoe" joins our stranded hero (Philip Winchester) in the middle of his journey. When we meet him, he's already washed up on his Island of Despair, following multiple attempts to leave England, rather than become a stuffed suit. He's already befriended his man Friday (Tongayi Chirisa), who is halfway to British refinement—he can recite John Milton and speak 12 languages, but he still gets his clothes from corpses. We learn the tale of Crusoe's path to the island and his estrangement from his true love, Susannah (Anna Walton) in a series of soft-lit flashbacks. Between the tortured heroes stranded on beaches and the flashbacks, it's hard not to think of "Lost." But where "Lost" is a nesting doll, reveling in never being quite what it appears, "Crusoe" is perfectly happy to be all surface. It feels like a cartoon and looks like a perfume commercial, and by the end of the two-hour premiere, I felt about it like I do about my workweek. I wanted more Friday.

"Enemy" fares slightly better. Slater plays Henry Spivey, who is as stranded as Crusoe, but for making the opposite choice. Crusoe tried to avoid becoming a soulless corporate wage slave, but Henry embraced it. So now he's the Dilbertesque cubicle dweller we're used to seeing in films and television—boring job, boring car, boring nuclear family. He's content enough, until he starts to discover evidence of something awry—a matchbook from a place he's never been—and soon finds out he doesn't own his corporeal shell, it's actually a timeshare. Its other occupant is Edward Albright: trained spy, multilingual, charismatic, weapons-trained. A shadowy group headed by an icy Alfre Woodard installed the partition in Henry's personality, and now that it has become porous they have to work out a compromise. Henry gets to play family man, except when Edward needs to assassinate someone. "Enemy" is a cluster of lofty existential questions wrapped in goofy package. It's kind of a delight.

Neither of these shows is likely to pull NBC out of its funk, but Silverman's experiment does prove, like Classics Illustrated comics before it, that some stories will never die. They'll just get glossed up and tweaked and played with so the delivery system seems current. To that end, in "Kings," Goliath isn't a man, it's a tank. Need I say more?