Entertainment

Premiere week for CW, the network that rose from the combined ashes of UPN and WB, consists of only two new shows: Runaway, which premiered Monday, and The Game, which premieres tonight.

If The Game gives you a feeling of deja vu, it's probably because you're a fan of Girlfriends, the UPN series that in April presented an episode intended as a spinoff pilot.

Even though UPN didn't survive, the spinoff did.

Created by Mara Brock Akil, executive producer of Girlfriends, The Game is about the women in the lives of professional football players.

There's Melanie (Tia Mowry, one of the twin Sisters), a med student whose loving boyfriend, Derwin (Pooch Hall), is a third-string rookie for the San Diego Sabers; Tasha (Wendy Raquel Robinson), who starts the season as both mom and manager to gifted player Malik (Hosea Chanchez); and Kelly (Brittany Daniel), the white wife of a black player, Jason (Coby Bell).

The women have their own hierarchies, insecurities, rivalries and challenges, and The Game pays equal, if not more, attention to the ladies who lunch (and travel, and spy on their men, and try to block predatory groupies and homewreckers) as to the ball-playing men.

In theory, it's like a sitcom version of BBC America's Footballers' Wives, except with U.S. football, not soccer, as the central sport – and with a more appropriately ethnic focus.

Where The Game botches its game plan, though, is in writing punch lines that are much too broad, and in casting men who are more convincing in their roles and relationships than the women.

As in Footballers' Wives, the wives and girlfriends and groupies and moms should be dead center. In The Game, they're just kind of lifeless.

The Game should be all about the appeal and comedy of the female characters. With the show running against actual football on NBC Sunday nights, the football-fan viewership, male and female, will be elsewhere.

The Game

C-

7:30 tonight, CW. Starring Tia Mowry, Pooch Hall, Wendy Raquel Robinson, Coby Bell, Brittany Daniel and Hosea Chanchez. Produced by Kelsey Grammer, Mara Brock Akil and Steve Stark. 30 min.