Downtown Pleasures

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: TRIBECA

TIME: TUESDAYS, 9 P.M. EST, FOX

THE BOTTOM LINE: Robert De Niro's new anthology show is original and exciting; just please don't call it quality.

Get ready for that word again. Tribeca, the first TV series from Robert De Niro's New York City-based Tribeca Productions, is sure to be hailed by critics as "quality" television. The term once conveyed innocent praise, but lately it has become freighted with sanctimoniousness -- a club to beat the heads of dopey network executives who won't renew Brooklyn Bridge. TV shows should not strive for "quality." They should strive to be good. Tribeca is a good show.

Or at least, sometimes good. The series is a rare contemporary example of that toughest of all TV genres, the anthology show. Each week features a different, unrelated story linked only by the downtown Manhattan setting and a couple of recurring secondary characters (Philip Bosco as the owner of a restaurant and Joe Morton as a policeman who frequents it).

The first episode works nicely against TV type. The story deals with two black brothers, but there is no jivey street talk. The younger (Larry Fishburne) is a policeman, but we never see him draw a gun. The elder (Carl Lumbly) is an uptight banker, the sort of Republican stick-in-the-mud who gets lampooned on TV sitcoms. When the banker is killed in a mugging, the cop must grapple with a range of emotions: a craving for revenge; an emerging sense of responsibility for his brother's family; even (suggested ever so delicately) + romantic stirrings for his sister-in-law. Some of the dialogue clangs with touchy-feely phoniness ("How come you didn't cry when my father was killed?" an angry boy demands of his uncle). But the show scores with scenes of luminous originality and emotional truth: an improvised dance of grief by the widow; a jail-cell encounter between the cop and a man arrested for his brother's murder, in which hate runs smack into pity.

Later episodes waver between heavy-handed (Stephen Lang hamming it up as an embittered homeless man) and limply appealing (Melanie Mayron having relationship troubles). Like all anthology shows, Tribeca will have its ups and downs. But it also offers the pleasures of unpredictability: the sight of thinking, autonomous human beings facing real-world problems with no week-to- week narrative obligations. Don't call that quality; call it excitement.