Time of Your Life
8 tonight on WNYW/Ch.5
YOU think Times Square has been Disney-fied? Wait’ll you see the gauzy, cuddly, cuter-than-a-Care-Bear rendering of the East Village on “Time of Your Life.”
It’s been so artificially sweetened and softened that the community board might want to sue for defamation of the nabe’s perpetually hip, cynical and down-at-the-Manolo-Blahniks character.
Indeed, all of Manhattan has been reduced to a gingerbread backdrop for a sugarplum fairy of a leading lady, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Sarah Merrin, who clearly left no heart in San Francisco when she exited “Party of Five” and her relationship with the whiny Bailey for this spinoff.
After we’ve listened to her end a dutiful phone call to Bailey, Sarah is asked if that was her mother.
“Essentially,” she says.
Of course, “Party” fans know her biological mother has died, and she’s now looking for her biological father . . . not to mention herself.
After seeing tonight’s debut, we see eminent possibilities for “Love Boat”-style stunt-casting each week.
“I’m Sarah. You’re my father,” she could say to each week’s guest star. “No, I’m not, but I’d love to be,” each would say.
Because who couldn’t love a 22-year-old who turns the world on with her smile and who turns everyone she meets into a character right out of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”?
After a series of predictable and cliched scenes in which the airline loses her luggage and she gets propositioned by a guy who’s probably going to take his taxi-driver exam as soon as he leaves the airport, she knocks on the door of the East 10th Street building in which her mother lived some 20 years ago.
The super, Cecelia (Pauley Perette), whose hair is more Dharma than East Village, snarls, “Honey, this isn’t Colonial Williamsburg. I don’t give tours.”
In the next breath, Cecelia says that for 100 bucks (“and no paperwork”) Sarah can spend the weekend in the very apartment in which Sarah’s mother might have conceived her.
Oops! Struggling actress Romy (Jennifer Garner) already lives there, but she does not do what any New Yorker would do – haul Cecelia’s butt into court.
Instead, she welcomes this total stranger into her hearth and heart. She makes sure to show her the window from which she peers at her hunky neighbor as he goes about his very active sex life.
Within hours, Sarah will have won over everyone she meets, from session musician Maguire (Johnathan Schaech) who spurns a chance to tour with Bob Dylan so he can keep working at a used record store, to the “feisty waitress” Joss (Gina Rivera), who gives Sarah a job at the bar/pool hall/karaoke room next door.
The only one she doesn’t bond with instantly is “Party” fan Rosie O’Donnell, as the troll-like gatekeeper for the impresario Sarah is convinced is her dad.
Unless “Time” takes off its rose-colored glasses and gets real – about life in general, and life in New York in particular – it ain’t gonna be around that long.
Sarah has already uttered her exit line: “I’ll just go home, where everything is OK and I have nothing to complain about.”
The good news: Hewitt and her producers have “Party” to fall back on.
The bad news: Even that’s looking wobbly this year.