Among television's vast lexicon of unwritten rules there are three inviolable tenets: 1) don't offend minority groupsthey write letters; 2) don't tell sick jokesthey offend critics; 3) don't knock the herothe audience identifies with him. Failure to obey these laws is punishable by deathfor the show, and sometimes for the career of the creator. The result, inevitably, is a season like the present onelimp scripts and look-alike actors, the halt leading the bland.
No wonder then that the industry is confounded by the outsized success of NBC's Get Smart! Thumbing its nose at the rule book, Smart features an impossibly...
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