Family Drama

Three heavily armed men are faced off against each other in a bombed-out shell of a stone hut somewhere in Afghanistan. One is an American who is talking fast, trying to strike a deal with the others. It looks and sounds like a drug deal, when suddenly something goes wrong. Bullets fly, bodies fall. The sequence ends when an Afghani intentionally steps on a land mine rather than surrender. The American walks away covered in blood. This is the start of Traffic: The Miniseries, a six-hour film about international drug-trafficking, terrorism and America-as-world-policeman airing tonight through Wednesday on the USA cable channel.

American Family is being touted by PBS as the first weekly drama on American broadcast television about a Latino family. That's a historic claim, and the series deserves to be celebrated for its commitment to diversity and ethnic understanding. But creator Gregory Nava (El Norte and Selena) doesn't want viewers to think the 13-week series that begins Wednesday night on public television is only by, for and about the Latino experience. "American Family is about everybody's family," Nava said at a PBS press conference in Los Angeles.

WIMBLEDON, England - It was every little sister's nightmare. Serena Williams was trying so hard and playing so badly. She was fighting herself, trying to keep up with her big sister, Venus, who was soaring closer to a title match they both desperately wanted. She bounced her racket in the dust and slapped it on her leg. She shouted out a plaintive "Nooooo!" as a forehand sailed long. And when it ended in a tennis tiebreaker turned heartbreaker, with her last desperate serve and double fault, with the ball sliding agonizingly off the net and plunking onto the scarred grass, Serena Williams wiped her face and took the longest walk of her short career, to take comfort from a winner she has known all her life.

If it seems to you that everything on network television looks and sounds the same, I have a suggestion: Check out the premiere of "Now and Again," one of the stranger but also more intriguing pilots in years.Forgive me for not being able to describe it in a short, parenthetical bite, but neither CBS nor creator Glenn Gordon Caron ("Moonlighting") seems quite sure what to call the new hourlong series either.Caron calls it "wiggy and out there." CBS describes it as an "action-comedy-drama-romance about a middle-aged insurance executive who dies a violent death only to discover that his brain has been saved by a government anxious to put it in the body of a 26-year-old man they have manufactured in a laboratory."

Granted, it never was that great to begin with. But wait until you see tonight what the WB has done to "Hyperion Bay."The drama about a dying seaside town that's both rejuvenated and ripped apart when a computer company arrives is being re-launched under the guidance of Frank South, who most recently served as executive producer for "Melrose Place.""Hyperion" started as a family drama last fall under the care of Joseph Daugherty ("thirtysomething"). At the time, there was lots of talk about "quality" from the WB. But the series never found an audience, and quality is no longer Job One in Hyperion Bay.Carmen Electra, the former "Baywatch" star who married Dennis Rodman, joins the cast in tonight's episode titled "Young and on Fire."

Dr. Sydney Hansen has it all at age 30: a successful Beverly Hills practice in plastic surgery, a breathtaking Malibu beach house and a great-looking guy with whom to share it.And then one day, she realizes how much she absolutely hates her life.Welcome to "Providence," as in Rhode Island, the hometown to which Sydney returns on the day when her life in L.A. suddenly feels like it's turning to dust.Welcome, indeed. This new family drama from NBC is one of the most pleasant surprises of television's midseason.

"What family doesn't have its ups and downs?" Eleanor of Aquitaine says in James Goldman's "The Lion in Winter." The Hicken family, however, is definitely in an up cycle these days.Donald Hicken, head of the theater department at the Baltimore School for the Arts, has directed the production of "The Lion in Winter" that opens at Everyman Theatre Friday). His wife, Tana Hicken, who spent 15 years as a company member at Washington's Arena Stage, stars as Eleanor. And their daughter, Caitlin Bell, fresh out of graduate school at New York University, is Everyman's very first education director.

The main course of the 1994-1995 television season has been a flop, one of the worst flops in years. Only two new prime-time series, out of 32, have won enough viewers to be called hits -- NBC's "Friends" and "ER."But the networks are hoping that viewers will want seconds anyway. Tonight, they start the rollout of 14 more new series in what has come to be known as television's second season.On the surface, the menu of new series does not appear too promising. It mainly looks like older stars served up in warmed-over, old-time programming formulas: James Earl Jones as the grandpa in a family drama, Patty Duke as an ordained minister in another family drama, Valerie Harper heading up a secretarial pool, and James Brolin leading a rescue team.

On paper, it looked as if she were going to be just another TV mom in another family drama -- or worse. In this series, the teen-age daughter is the star, which usually means mom is further reduced to standing around off-camera in the kitchen, only occasionally popping on-screen to ask if anyone wants pizza or a glass of Coke.But that's not the Patty Chase that Baltimore's Bess Armstrong brought to the screen when the critically acclaimed ABC drama "My So-Called Life" debuted last month.Her 15-year-old daughter, Angela, dyed her hair red, so Patty went out and got her own hair cut very, very short.

Sitting down? Better be, because here it comes: The best new offering on TV tonight is a made-for-television movie on the USA Network. There. I said it, and I meant it.* "Byrds of Paradise" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- Timothy Busfield of "thirtysomething" stars as a recent widower who packs off his kids and dog and moves to Hawaii, to take a job as a headmaster of a small prep school. There are enough quirky characters to make this tropical series a sort of "Southern Exposure," but the real focus is the family drama itself.