As I've been sitting through the preliminary episodes of Lexx Season One, the thought that keeps crossing my mind is why these stories were stretched into two-hour TV movies. It defies programming logic on every front. The longer something is, the more expensive it is to make and the less ad revenue it generates. It also doesn't benefit the story in any conceivable way. So far, none of the episodes I've watched had to run as long as they did. Tense moments, especially in this week's episode "Super Nova", get stretched out to the point of absurdity, but it's not a knowing, ironic over-expansion, just a poor directorial choice. Most curious of all, Lexx ends up being an inadvertent lesson in how TV characters are really designed with brief encounters in mind rather than cinema-length lingering.

The characters on Lexx aren't particularly interesting, or at least not interesting enough to spend two hours a week with them. They're broad archetypes that rely on exaggerated mannerisms and gimmicks rather than any dramatic depth. This in itself isn't a problem. Lexx, after all, is a half-serious science fiction show that leans on giddily low-brow material like so much televised junk food. But all those mannerisms, however enjoyable they may be, really start to wear thin after even an hour, let alone two.

This is especially true of Giggerota, a potentially fun character played by Ellen Durbin that unfortunately gets written into that unenviable corner where viewers beg for her departure from the show, preferably by lethal means. "Super Nova" wastes so much time letting Durbin ham it up that the more interesting details of planet Brunnis get mostly ignored.

On the good end of the ham spectrum, this episode's B-cinema guest star is none other than Tim Curry, playing the last of the old Brunnen-G who left their home planet a few thousand years prior to the events in the show. He's a cynical fop called Poet Man who found himself abandoned on the planet the day everyone else left, so he devises a cruel, intricate way of using recordings of himself and some jury-rigged technology to, among other things, pass on his genes through unsuspecting future visitors before the sun of Brunnis explodes.

For all of Lexx's weak points, it has little glimmers of cleverness that keep it from being just plain forgettable. Every hopelessly ridiculous deus ex machina (like talking, benevolent stars) has a counter-point in deliciously meta concepts like an oracle who talks to Stanley Tweedle through somebody else's recorded memories. The weirdness of this show keeps it unpredictable and interesting long after the characters have grown annoying and the plot holes have stretched big enough to swallow the entire story.

I'm giving Lexx the benefit of the doubt because, despite being four hours into the series, this is still just the second episode. I can think of a lot of great shows that would have seemed nearly unwatchable if even the first half of their first seasons were all you had to judge their overall quality. I've watched most of the Season One movies and I'd like to at least sample some of the material from Lexx's other three seasons before I make my final decision.