First of all, we bid a tearful farewell to one of the greats of television and stage, Jerry Orbach. Best knows as Lenny Briscoe on “Law and Order” Jerry died of prostate cancer. Orbach has been often credited for being a chief reason the show became such a hit; his acerbic wit and perfect comedy timing making the show unique.

Okay, now to start off the New Year right, (in my own pithy way, of course.) What do you get when you take a retired hit television series, recast it, give characters a sex-change operation, proliferate it with special effects, change the plotlines, and remove all the warmth and magic of the original, replacing them with mindless action and storylines even more absurd than the original?

The answer is, ”Battlestar: Galactica”, the newest example of rehash, brought to us by the Sci-Fi Channel.

The mini series started the ball rolling. Okay, maybe it was amusing to see newcomers trying to follow in the footsteps of the originals. But once again, the tendency to stuff in CGI, hoping it will make the viewer overlook such banalities as weak scripts and performances that are lackluster and two-dimensional results in just plain deck. James Olmos tries valiantly to fill the space boots left vacant by the late Lorne Green as Commander Adama, but falls seriously short. Most pathetic of all is the ‘feminization’ of Dirk Benedict’s character “Starbuck”, now played by Katee Sackhoff, who comes off as testosterone driven baitsim-buster, with more masculinity than any of the male characters. The Ceylons look like characters out of a Marvel comic, their once glistening chrome shells replaces by gray plastic, (although for some reason, the producers have now come up with a slick idea that “Ceylons look like US !”) and the entire art design is dark and sinister.

Mind you, I wasn’t all that farklempt when the original series came out back in the late seventies.  It was a blatant, albeit slick rip-off of ‘Star Wars’ right down to the Ceylon’s looking like Liberace’s idea of Darth Vader. But the combination of casting, writing, and pure chemistry made it, impossibly, work well. Lorne Green managed to segue his ‘Ben Cartwright’ warmth into the future, bringing a true fatherly overtone to a role that could have been cold and sterile. The chemistry between the actors and their characters is missing in the re-hash, and the writer’s attempts to make a ‘new millennium’ version of the show comes off as nothing more than a “We changed it because we could” bastardization of an otherwise endearing classic.

I could be wrong. When Sci-Fi brought out “Stargate-SG1” I thought, “Nu? Richard Dean Anderson, taking over for Kurt Russel?” I gave the series 13 episodes before it would up in the “DOA” file. But Anderson made it work, and superbly. The fact that they brought back characters from the movie played by the original actors helped. But “Battlestar: Galactica” offers no such references. The attitude seems to be, “Yentz the old, new is always better!”

Maybe the viewing audience has become conditioned to the concept that actors and their craft are only there to support the FX wizards and their two-dimensional creations. But even so, it might not help in this case, where even the live actors seem only two dimensional. All we can do is, wait and see.

In closing, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you next month.