Word: ticking
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...waiting is over, and you didn't need to be in New York or Washington or Kabul to feel like a soldier--or a target. The clock becomes a time bomb: we were warned that retaliation is now certain; we wait, move to higher alert; time passes, tick, tick; see anything suspicious? And we come to realize that something sinister has been planted in our midst, not just the threat but also the fear of the threat...
...super-Americans (Wonder Woman, the Bionic Man and Woman); after the cold war, postmodern parodies (Space Ghost). Call it coincidence or prescience, but a new generation of prime-time superhero is arriving for a new decade and a new war. Smallville (the WB, Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) and The Tick (Fox, Thursdays, 8:30 p.m. E.T., debuts Nov. 8) were created long before Sept. 11, but their likable, workaday heroes still resonate...
Like Smallville, director Barry Sonnenfeld's parody The Tick bets that old-fashioned superhero tales will not, so to speak, fly today. The dim-bulb hero (Patrick Warburton, Seinfeld's Puddy) is a font of cockeyed metaphors ("I will spread my buttery justice over your every nook and cranny!"), and in the pilot he fights a Soviet robot built in 1979 to kill Jimmy Carter, as if to admit that the very idea of the infallible superhero is decades outdated. Based on Ben Edlund's cult comic, this is exactly the kind of highly ironic, hero-puncturing entertainment that...
...times have changed even for the most super among us. It's hard to imagine teen Clark or the Tick enlisting to fight against Osama bin Laden (though al-Qaeda actually fits the mold of the comics' stateless supervillains better than Hitler and Tojo did). But both series ring differently after Sept. 11 in ways that will test how the conflict has affected pop culture. Smallville's most interesting character is not Clark but Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), who will someday become Superman's enemy but here, for now, is a lonely if cynical rich kid who wants...
...seating, one can see each and every expression, tick and discreet glance of the actresses, which is a treat as they convincingly embody their respective characters...