TV REVIEWS : ‘White Dwarf’ Takes Peek at 31st Century

Writer-producer Bruce Wagner’s last TV project, the sprawling, hard-boiled sci-fi “Wild Palms,” was spread out over several viewing nights. In tonight’s “White Dwarf,” another futuristic fantasia, Wagner again introduces just about as many bizarre characters and science-fiction conceits, but compacted into a singular time slot. It’s a whole lot of loopiness for two hours.

In the year 3040, a callow young doctor from Manhattan (Neal McDonough) is arriving on the distant planet Rusta to intern with a wizened local physician (Paul Winfield), not seeming to know much more than viewers about just what 31st-Century weirdness he’s getting into.

Rusta is literally divided into two halves--a continual light side and dark side--with weather artificially administered by “regulators” that hover in the sky along with the titular sun. The folks dwelling in the half of this world characterized by perpetual night literally never have a nice day, so, inevitably, civil war is raging, providing lots of bloody business for the single planetary clinic.

The dark-side crowd tends toward a medieval motif, with kings and princesses and sword-wielding mercenaries; the lighter side is inhabited by simple settlers who dress and behave exactly like American frontierspeople, but for the odd techno-gizmo. (Either way, it’s flattering that the far-distant future will be full of second-millennium wanna-bes.)

Francis Ford Coppola is named as co-executive producer, and Wagner’s pedigree is promising in itself, so the occasional flashes of wit and intelligence here aren’t surprising. It’s reasonably engaging, even, in a classy/cheesy “Deep Space Nine” kind of way.

Still, the fact that, under Peter Markle’s direction, so many characters are introduced with such uniformly rushed, minor payoffs--and that the background of this strange world is never sufficiently explained--means “White Dwarf” has “unsuccessful pilot” written all over it. This one doesn’t have its controls set for the heart of the sun.

* “White Dwarf” airs at 8 tonight on Fox (Channels 11 and 6).