'Comanche Moon' fails to reach heights of 'Dove'

With orange hair flowing down - far enough, in one balcony scene, to cover her bare breasts - Griffiths plays Inez Scull, the wife of Val Kilmer's Captain Inish Scull of the Texas Rangers. Left for long stretch es by her husband, who's captive to a Mexican bandit during much of "Comanche Moon," she seduces the young men of Austin, Texas, corrupts them, then spits them out like cherry pits. In the General Store, testing whips she plans to employ on her slaves, humming at an unseemly volume, she is a spectacle of absurdly broad gestures.

For the first hour of "Comanche Moon," which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channel 4, it looks as though the three-part miniseries might be a fabulous botch, a smorgasbord of bad acting and Western-movie stereotypes that's awesome in its awfulness. But gradually, the miniseries settles into a more mediocre middle ground that is merely tedious, simplistic, and disjointed, like a six-hour episode of "F Troop" without Larry Storch. The only decent thing: Steve Zahn, who finds the right pitch between comedy and lonesomeness as hard-drinking Ranger Gus McCrae. When he tells Linda Cardellini's Clara, "You're the only woman who's ever really had my heart" in part 3, it's more evocative than it should be thanks to Zahn's touch. If only he hadn't paid a visit to Inez Scull's parlor (or, as Griffiths puts it, her "pah-lah") during a visit home to Austin.

The richer, more lyrical "Lonesome Dove" miniseries from 1989 followed two former Rangers, McCrae and Woodrow Call, on a journey to Montana to start a cattle ranch. Played magnificently by Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, the older McCrae and Call were figures of honor and regret, with flaws both eccentric and tragic. "Dove" was based on the first of Larry McMurtry's four-novel saga of the Old West, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986.