'HACK' ADDS SOME ACTION

Hack fans who've been worried about CBS' promise to lighten up the show may draw some comfort from tomorrow night's season premiere of the Philly-based drama, in which David Morse's Mike Olshansky does not appear to have been turned into a singing, dancing cop-turned-cabdriver.

If anything, he's not quite as funny as he was last season, thanks to a ramped-up level of action that has him, in the show's opening moments, beating up three bad guys while a fare waits for him in the back seat. The violence continues with a graphic scene in which four people are gunned down in a suburban living room. (No, not by Mike.)

Sadly, George Dzundza's gambling priest is gone, dispatched in a few lines of dialogue between Olshansky and his old partner, Marcellus Washington (Andre Braugher), who still aren't getting along very well.

Promising additions, though, include Jacqueline Torres as a nun-turned-probation officer who lives next door to Mike, and Matt Czuchry as a young con artist who's no doubt there to lower the average age of the cast.
For the moment, though, I'm willing to trust Mike Olshansky in the driver's seat.

It's a long way from Hack to NBC's American Dreams, the season's other set-in-Philadelphia series - about 2,700 miles and nearly four decades.

But while the Hollywood-filmed Dreams is easily dismissed as a lighter-than-air look at life in the good old days, this family drama, too, seems to be striving for something a little deeper.

It's probably just as well that creator Jonathan Prince had thought of doing a show about a Philadelphia family coping with the changes wrought by the 1960s before his old boss, Dick Clark, came along and offered him the archives of American Bandstand to draw from.

Because while the black-and-white Bandstand footage, cleverly spliced with new film, provides a lively background for the coming-of-age story that focuses on the Pryor family's 15-year-old daughter, Meg (Brittany Snow), the real action on "American Dreams" takes place around the Pryors' dinner table, where her parents, Jack (Tom Verica) and Helen (Gail O'Grady), are experiencing culture shock on a nightly basis as they bring up four children.

The year being 1963, one shock is all too predictable - and the treatment of it a little forced - but in many of its smaller moments, "American Dreams" manages to tug at our emotions rather than merely manipulate them.

You can reach Ellen Gray by e-mail at elgray@phillynews.com, by fax at 215-854-5852 or by mail at the Philadelphia Daily News, Box 7788, Philadelphia, PA 19101.