Falling In Love

If only Leo Roth and Isabel Lukens were interesting people.But they're not, and that could prove bad news for "Relativity," the series premiering at 10 tonight on WMAR, Channel 2, as the latest offering from angst-meisters Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz.Not that "Relativity" is bad TV. The dialogue is crisp, the supporting characters winning, the production values top-notch. You might even enjoy the show, but you won't remember anything about it five minutes after it's over. And we've come to expect much more from the men who brought "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life" to television.

In a world where everybody wants to direct, it figures that the man who has made an astonishing directorial debut at the age of 49 never wanted to direct."

Washington. -- Even a hopeless news junkie gets tired of Bosnia, the budget babble and the inanity of Washington politics. So I got away from the madness and meanness and just languished in love -- the joy of discovering it, the heaven of being in it and the bittersweet sorrow of seeing it slip away.Over the holiday weekend I turned on my CD player and didn't stop listening to music until I had chosen the 30 best love songs ever written. Today I write about falling in love -- choices only you who are cold of heart could disagree with.

"Anatomy of Love" isn't an anatomy lesson at all. It's a show-and-tell about love and marriage from an anthropologist's point of view.In the four-hour documentary that begins at 8:05 tonight on cable channel TBS, that means we are studied as primates are studied -- or birds, elephants or almost anything else with DNA to pass on to offspring.Tonight's first two hours are almost academic enough to watch with your children. The only naked body parts shown are arms.But the second part, which airs tomorrow night at 8:05, covers adultery, breaking up and staying together.

He's out there. A lumbering, bewhiskered marine mammal, inexplicably blundering around the Chesapeake Bay. And as bay temperatures drop and the wily manatee eludes his rescuers' nets, the tension mounts. Can this manatee be saved?The question is gripping plenty of Marylanders. But even before the endangered sea cow wandered into Queenstown Creek this week, Maryland was catching manatee fever.Once little known outside Florida, manatees are suddenly hot everywhere. Their popularity has been on the rise ever since pop singer Jimmy Buffett began crusading for the manatee's survival a decade ago.Now animal lovers across the country are snapping up manatee T-shirts, stuffed animals and coffee cups.

The monsters are back. Yes, for your fall movie-going, genuine scary monsters of the sort that so rarely make it to the screen anymore.We have very scary professional hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in the intensely awaited "Pulp Fiction." We have the big guy himself, in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," with Robert De Niro throwing the long shadow as he clomps around in cement boots. We have that blood-sucking freak Lestat, the vampire himself, as personified by Tom Cruise, and won't that be a fright?

Credit where due: "I Love Trouble" is a soundly engineered, professionally astute entertainment machine that, while avoiding any dangerous taint of distinction, offers a neatly crafted confection of laughs and thrills.Inspired by the screwball newspaper comedies of the Thirties and Forties -- "It Happened One Night" and "His Girl Friday" come to mind -- it follows the love-hate-love relationship of a couple of hotshot Chicago reporters trying to get the inevitable big story while falling in love, dodging quips, put-downs and Uzi bursts all the way.Its best thing is the devious and provocative sexual dynamic between two exceedingly handsome co-stars, Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte.

It is a strange sensation, to gaze into the gene pool and see your own reflection.To look at your child's face and see your own eyes looking back at you, to catch a glimpse of him and see a gesture that is eerily familiar. To listen to him talk and hear your own feelings played back for you. To watch your child live out his young life and feel like you are watching yourself relive yours, helpless to pass on to him at 10 the lessons you learned at 30.It isn't fair, really, that childbirth should produce a carbon copy.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- It was love at first sight, Sarajevo style. He saw her through his rifle scope as she stood in line for her family's water, then he walked over from his sentry post to chat.Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love.But in the besieged city of Sarajevo there are always further, messier chapters: Boy's apartment wrecked by shell fire. Girl's uncle killed by grenade. Boy's friends die face-down in the mud at the front. Girl's neighbor shot in the head by sniper.

Title: "The Queen and I"Author: Sue TownsendPublisher: Soho PressLength, price: 239 pages, $22"The Queen and I" starts with a wonderfully hilarious premise -- what if the British royal family were thrown out of its palaces, and Queen Elizabeth and her clan were forced to live like commoners? Clearly, the pampered ex-princes and princesses have no marketable skills, so they'd need to go on welfare. Sue Townsend's sadistic scenario sends the Windsors to Hellebore Close (Hell for short), a squalid public housing development.