MYSTERY SHOT

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

To a certain kind of discerning television viewer it remains a pop-culture mystery why millions more Americans this season tuned to CBS's lead-armed Walker, Texas Ranger on Saturday nights than to ABC's nuanced romantic drama Relativity. To many TV producers this is not a vexing question, however. Nothing is more dramatic than the conflict between life and death, they will tell you (even if the conflict involves Chuck Norris). Slice-of-life series almost never win the ratings that crime shows pull in, which is why eight of the nine new network dramas premiering this spring feature people yelling out lines like "Get me on the phone with forensics!"

The latest--and most impressively pedigreed--of these new series is ABC's Gun, which starts on April 12 and runs in Relativity's old time slot (Saturdays, 10 p.m. EDT). Conceived by director Robert Altman, Gun aims to follow the life of a single pistol--an intriguing premise until you realize that no single episode will have any relation to the last.

But then arbitrariness is the show's only distinguishing element. In the first episode, dwarfs appear as waiters at a swank hotel for no explicable reason. In some ways, Gun resembles a camp version of Altman's Short Cuts. Like that film, it offers vignettes of the striving and the desperate. With Gun, though, viewers are left with characters like Lilly (Rosanna Arquette), a lonely housewife prone to doing suggestive aerobics alone in her living room and whining as though she's ingested too much Slim-Fast. Chuck Norris would at least know enough to ease the pain with a chili dog.

--By Ginia Bellafante