{alltv} 'Breaking In' is no laughing matter

Here we go a-capering. Again.

TV's long-running love affair with capers and cons has seldom seemed stronger than at the moment. Variations on the use-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief theme, popular since It Takes a Thief, can be found on TNT with Leverage, USA with White Collar and Burn Notice, A&E with Breakout Kings and — if you stretch the concept to include a con-man fake psychic — CBS with The Mentalist.

As the networks have come close to exhausting the topic in the hour-long form, Fox tries it as a sitcom with Breaking In. Christian Slater, making a better bid for TV success after the ill-chosen My Own Worst Enemy and The Forgotten, stars as Oz, the head of a high-tech team that proves people need new security services by bursting through their current security services.

If intricate plotting is what you want, Breaking In has it, laying out its scam in the first half, then revealing the twists we missed in near-finale flashbacks (much as Leverage does). Like most current capers, it's very clever.

And like so many current sitcoms, it isn't very funny.

Not everyone, oddly, will see that as a drawback. There are those who seem to think "wryly, mildly amusing" is the ideal sitcom sweet spot. But for those who still hang onto the hope that a comedy will deliver actual laughs, Breaking In doesn't.

You can't fault the cast, which is more than appealing enough. Slater, in particular, has his best series role yet as the manipulative, mysterious Oz. He gives a performance you might suspect was modeled on Charlie Sheen in his "Vatican assassin" phase, if you didn't know the show was shot and finished long before Sheen's meltdown.

As Cameron, the newbie hacker Oz blackmails into working for him, Bret Harrison takes the same likable "who me?" approach that worked for him in Reaper. Rounding out the team are Odette Annable as a safecracker Cameron crushes on; Alphonso McAuley as a prank-pulling gadget guru; and Trevor Moore as a master of disguise whom fans of The Office will recognize as sort-of-Dwight-light.

It's all pleasant enough tonight, as Cameron gets initiated into the team, which means stealing a couple of cars while finding his own flipped upside down. The show's attempt to turn Oz's "I'll allow it" into a catchphrase is a bit tiresome, but otherwise, the characters and the plot twists combine to make the time pass painlessly.

Unfortunately, a later episode that casts Alyssa Milano as a "cougar" takes on the kind of nasty, childishly dirty edge that is typical to Fox comedies. Even in these times when crude humor abounds, a joke about female grooming, which is trying so desperately to be adult, simply comes across as tastelessly juvenile.

You'd like to think that was a first for TV, but we all know that's not true.

Breaking In
Fox, Wednesday, 9:30 ET/PT
* * 1/2 out of four