One of the drawbacks to watching any of the programming on Fox this summer is the interminable promotion of shows premiering in the fall (sort of like how the World Series last year was seemingly brought to us by Keifer Sutherland). There are four shows that have, after much, much promotion, stuck in my head.

Fastlane The Fox website touts it as being brought to us by the director of Charlie's Angels and the writer of The Fugitive, which is at best half promising.

The set-up is like pretty much every other cop show. Using a vast warehouse of luxury cars, high performance motorcycles, and tony designer clothing and accessories, a pair of LA's finest fight crime while reporting to a supervisor who looks like a magazine cover model.

Clearly, the folks behind this show have exposed themselves to a dangerous mixture of The Fast and the Furious, Grand Theft Auto, and Robo trippin', but have had to clean things up for network TV. Even Fox has standards. I think.

My brother is a cop. Admittedly, he works in Chelsea, Massachusetts, not the sort of place where a lot of confiscated Rolexes and Ducatis are going to wind up. But I don't remember him ever mentioning that officers got to use impounded goods for anything. And I certainly don't think his supervisor ever appeared on the cover of Cosmo, Teen, YM, or Sophisticate's Hairstyle Guide.

I'm sure Vin Diesel will appear as the cheif of some sort of Gen Y hardbody police squad during sweeps.

girls club I don't even know where to start with how much the promos for this have turned me off. Let us count the ways.

1. It's a David E. Kelley production. His forays into the legal world include the self-hating and self-absorbed defenders on The Practice and the loopy, anorexic, and self-absorbed shysters on Ally McBeal. They say bad things come in threes.

2. Gretchen Mol plays the blonde lawyer. For those of you not familar with Mol, Vanity Fair tapped her as the "next big thing" back in 1998 just as she made her foray into major films in Rounders, a not bad film starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton. The only problem was someone forgot to tell Mol that she was supposed to be big. Four years later, she's mostly been in smaller movies and crap (The Thirteenth Floor and Get Carter, the latter of which she tried to duck by being uncredited).

I don't know if Mol's trying to channel Kim Novak in the cool blonde department, but it's not working. Mol seems more detached than cool, which (for me at least) leads to apathy, if not dread, of her performances.

That and Kim Novak's not dead! Don't channel the living, it'll screw up some sort of inter-dimensional barrier. Didn't Superman II teach us anything?

3. The name of the show is in all lowercase. The estate of e. e. cummings, contact your attorney.

4. The three lead actresses are blonde, brunette, and redheaded. Couldn't we just have a live action Powerpuff Girls instead?

5. Giancarlo Esposito apparently plays one of the partners of the law firm the show follows. I have a bad identification with Esposito from the last season of Homicide. He wasn't the worst offender (I'm looking at you, Jon Seda!), but was emblematic of the way the show tanked at the end.

6. Felicity Huffman is resigned to doing this show? What the hell? It's not as bad as Josh Malina getting stuck with Imagine That, but yikes! How have these people pissed Aaron Sorkin off? Can't we use Rob Lowe's salary to fund some recurring roles to save people from crap?

7. The ad uses a Madonna song. Personal problem.

8. The show hasn't aired episode one, and Fox already has message boards up for it. Again I say, what the hell?

I know, it's trying to take the Ally time slot and demo and run, so as an over 30 male I shouldn't be interested. And I'm not. Mission accomplished, I guess.

John Doe A man who knows everything doesn't know his own name or how he got where he is. Kind of like if Dwight Kidder got knocked on the head and left in a corn field in Nebraska.

It's in the Friday at 9 slot, so it's going for that X Files/Millenium/Dark Angel vibe. It at least appears moderately interesting.

Firefly It's 400 years in the future, there's been some sort of "universal civil war" according to the show's Fox website (how can a civil war be universal? Aren't civil wars intra- rather than inter-?). A transport ship cruises the outer planets trying to dodge the powers that be while hauling stuff, doing some things that aren't wholly legal, and otherwise participating in the sort of affairs that are normally left to folks on Star Trek or crappy syndicated shows.

Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame is in charge of this, so I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. But I'm out if space demons start showing up.

The one new show that didn't stick in my head was Cedric the Entertainer Presents. It's sketch comedy, it's a large man dancing, it's on Wednesday at 8:30 when I'll be looking for improvement out of Ed.