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"The Invisible Man," a tongue-in-cheek and up-to-date rendering of the H.G. Wells classic, launches as a weekly series with a terrific two-hour premiere at 8 tonight (repeating at 10 p.m.) on Sci-Fi Channel.

Vincent Ventresca ("Boston Common," "Prey") plays an inept thief from a middle-class home, a tough premise to buy even if you leave out Ventresca's likability and his fashionably disheveled look. To avoid hard time, he agrees to become a human guinea pig in a top-secret experiment (guess what's involved) led by his scientist brother.

After an hour or so of convoluted action and storyline, two of the show's regular characters surface. One is a comically disgruntled spook played by Paul Ben-Victor, who is brought in to turn "Invisible Man" into what it, ahem, transparently is: a detective "buddy show." Eddie Jones also makes an appearance as the duo's paper-pushing government boss.

By the way, isn't it about time HBO or Showtime took on the challenge of adapting Ralph Ellison's pathbreaking 1952 novel Invisible Man? Peculiar how the notion of disappearing can have such an enduring appeal in Hollywood while at the same time most Americans — and not just the black lead of Ellison's book — are struggling to be noticed.

Also tonight, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" welcomes the cast of the underground musical hit from L.A., "White Trash Wins Lotto." Read more about this production and its creator in this L.A. Weekly article. Reader Andrew Solmssen writes that they "will be performing a number called 'Good Evening Guitar Center.' This musical is a brilliant and powerful look at the music industry as expressed in the rise and fall of one Axl W. Rose of Guns and Roses fame (or an Axl-like character if you and the lawyers prefer)." Can't wait.

Now he's Really Silent Bob

If I were a betting man, I'd have put my money on two. And I would've collected, because ABC just pulled the plug on "Clerks," the animated version of Kevin Smith's 1994 indie hit, after only two episodes.

Why two? Well, that's how long ABC gave its last edgy program, "Wonderland," and just because this is summer season doesn't mean the network is obligated to give "Clerks" any extra slack. And there's another reason: After two above-average episodes, the quality of subsequent "Clerks" episodes drops off noticeably.

ABC sent a "Clerks" preview cassette with six episodes to TV critics. To the network's credit, they rearranged the viewing order so that critics would see the best episodes first. By the time I got around to the original pilot episode, which ABC had pushed down to fifth, the laughs they was a-few and a-far in-between. (The unfunny "Episode Five," which had been scheduled to air June 21, inflamed some gay activists because it showed every one of Randal's ex-girlfriends mutating into militant lesbians.)

But the clincher for me was the news that "Dirty Dancing" star Patrick Swayze recently avoided a brush with death in a plane crash. Episode three of "Clerks," you see, makes great fun of Swayze. A character named "Patrick Swayze," bearing a strong resemblance to the actor, is introduced as an employee at the new pet store just down the block from the convenience store. When the Clerks go into the store, they assume Swayze is the owner, and Swayze makes no effort to disabuse them of this. (The voice of Swayze, by the way, is supplied by Gilbert Gottfried, who of course doesn't sound anything like Swayze.) But as is soon revealed, he's just a mop-pusher.

To have aired the episode so close by the real-life Swayze's near-misfortune would've seemed cruel, to say the least. Clearly, "Clerks" was doomed from the start.

Sam Donaldson on the loose

ABC News-man Sam Donaldson recently told Gail Shister that he loves doing stuff on his company's Internet site, ABCNEWS.Com, because "no one is watching," at least among the network brass: "There's no pressure on me or us to do anything. We can be very loose." Don't believe him? Read this excerpt from an official ABC transcript of Donaldson's interview this week with funnywoman Ellen DeGeneres:

SAM DONALDSON: ... Ellen, before we leave I've got to ask you a question that keeps coming up frequently. You said when you were approached about marrying Anne Heche that in Vermont, where they now have legal same-sex marriage ... [I]f it were legal where you live, would you get married?

ELLEN DeGENERES: Oh, yeah. I mean, in my mind we're married. Absolutely I would get married. I mean, I think everybody wants this, you know, the same rights that, you know, if something would happen to Ann or to myself in the hospital to be able to make decisions and go in there and, you know, if something would happen to either of us we'd be able to take care of the house and things wouldn't be taken away from us. So absolutely we'd get married if it were legal.

SAM DONALDSON: Well, if she keeps going and doing these "Psycho" movies, in which she gets murdered in the shower, she's not going to be around.

ELLEN DeGENERES: No, and —

SAM DONALDSON: Folks, she did the remake of "Psycho."

ELLEN DeGENERES: Yeah, I'm not going to let her do that anymore. That was actually — let me just tell you a really quick funny story. Right after she did "Psycho," which I was very upset by, I just hated seeing that, our dog got sprayed by a skunk in the country. And you're supposed to wash him with tomato sauce to get the — but we didn't have tomato sauce, we just had whole pomade tomatoes in the boxes. So I kept running back to get more tomatoes. And I come back and she's in the shower and there's just read tomato stuff all over the shower and she's naked in there just covered with the red tomatoes and the dog, and it was right after she did "Psycho." And it was a pretty frightening experience, just — there was no knife involved or anything, just her with red tomatoes all over, but —

SAM DONALDSON: I can understand how that wouldn't be very funny.

ELLEN DeGENERES: No, it was scary.

On this date...

in 1986, light bulb and nuclear weapons manufacturer General Electric decides to produce more bombs and thus buys the RCA Corporation, parent company of NBC, for $6.4 billion. At the time it is the largest non-oil merger in history. David Letterman is thrilled.

June 10: in 1991, Donna Hayward discovers Ben Horne is her father; Agent Cooper's love Annie Blackburne (Heather Graham) is named Miss Twin Peaks and subsequently captured by Windom Earle; Nadine Hurley recovers from her amnesia, becomes 35 again, and regains her obsession with drape runners; Ben Horne gets slapped and hits his head on the fireplace; Audrey Horne, Andrew Packard and Pete Martell are (possibly) blown to smithereens; and Agent Cooper is possessed by BOB as David Lynch makes every effort to not wrap up loose ends (and get back at ABC for what he considers poor treatment of his show) on what is promised to be the last-ever episode of "Twin Peaks."

June 11: in 1961, CBS teams longtime friends Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett for "Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall," the first of three specials the duo will star in for the network over the course of 37 years. In one of the more ominous sketches, Andrews stars as a member of "The Pratt Family of Switzerland," little knowing she'll be playing Maria von Trapp just three years later. -- Tom Heald

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