1-800-MISSING

Well, damn. Another Meg Cabot adaptation with all the charisma and force of wet toilet paper.

Meg Cabot is the author of the hugely popular and very funny book "The Princess Diaries", which was turned into a sticky, generic, Disneyfied mess of a movie. Writing under the name Jenny Carroll, she is also the author of the 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU books, which I really enjoy. They center around Jess, a teenager who develops the psychic power to find missing kids after she's struck by lightning. Jess is my favorite Meg Cabot character; she's funny, fiercely loyal, and prone to getting into fistfights with school jocks. She has a big family, a best friend, a brooding boyfriend, instant lust for shiny motorcycles, and an amusingly adversarial relationship with the FBI agents who start tailing her.

The TV series ditches everything I liked about the books, including most of the characters and Jess's personality. It kills off her father for no better reason than to give her a cloying bonding moment with a runaway girl. Jess is paired up with an FBI agent played by Gloria Reuben, who does very little other than whine and occasionally wave a gun. The script is disjointed and dull, and Jess's visions don't provide any leads that wouldn't have been generated by a competent investigation.

Post-Gazette TV critic Rob Owen, who can normally be relied upon for good taste and snarky comments, liked this one; maybe he was drunk or something. Me, I'd like to smack the producers upside the head for taking great source material, with sharp characters, a fun premise, and attitude to spare, and turning it into a series that's cheap, lazy, and offensively bland.

I should make it clear that I didn't dislike 1-800-MISSING just because it departed from the books. Movies and TV narratives work differently than books; a good book about the adaptation process is William Goldman's "Which Lie Did I Tell?" At least it won't do any harm to Gloria Reuben's career, because no one will ever remember that she was in it.

With the success of Harry Potter, the Princess Diaries, and Louis Sachar's Holes (great book, decent movie), the studios seem to be optioning every teen series on the shelf (see also the WB's "Fearless", based on the books by Francine Pascal, which has been getting such amusingly bad advance reviews that it's already been pulled off the fall schedule for a revamp). But I doubt we'll see an adaptation of the other Jenny Carroll series, the Mediator books; they're such a blatant (albeit fun) Buffy-meets-The-Sixth-Sense ripoff that no lawyer in his right mind would risk the lawsuit.

But hey, maybe they'll delve into the teen psychic classics: "A Gift of Magic" by Lois Duncan (who also wrote "I Know What You Did Last Summer") and "The Girl With the Silver Eyes" by Willo Davis Roberts would make great made-for-TV movies. Just not, please God, by the talentless idiots responsible for 1-800-MISSING.

Woooo. I think I've just given myself the pop culture equivalent of an ice cream headache.