IT'S "THE PRISONER," "The Avengers," "The Fugitive" and "Coronet Blue." It's the spurious child of "The X-Files" and "Touched by an Angel."

It's one weird, wild, even warm series that weaves a web of wit and mystery (OK, no more alliteration today) that pulls you ever deeper into its suspenseful thrall.

Enough waxing rhapsodic. Let's get down to brass tacks, or brass knuckles, or emotional mind-games or whatever it is the contentious characters in "The Pretender" are willing to employ so mercilessly on one another in their ever-fiercer contest of wills, weapons and wiles (oops, sorry).

This is one reckless ride, this Saturday night NBC vigilante / psychological / secret-agent series whose unique and complex appeal is being enjoyed by more and more people - so many that the network hasalready ordered a full 22-episode second season.

"People are discovering it from word of mouth, which is exciting beyond anything," says "Pretender" star Michael T. Weiss, "because I think that's the way a show becomes a hit, by building its own reputation and standing."

So what's his word of mouth on this multi-layered hour? How does Weiss explain its intricate story threads to would-be watchers?

"It's too hard to. I just tell 'em to watch it," he says, and you can practically see him grinning over the phone from his L.A. home. "It's a show that reinvents itself - it's lighter-edged, it's darker-edged, it's a family show, it's warm, it's driven. We're trying to make it different each week, so you don't know what to expect."

Creators Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle (writers on "Alien Nation") started it last fall this way: Weiss is Jarod, a man in his late 30s who'd been taken as a child into a mysterious institute called the Centre. He'd shown promise as a "pretender" - a person who can walk into any situation, absorb all information about it, and literally become whomever he or she wants to be: a surgeon, a test pilot, a 'gator wrestler, a federal marshal. Locked in the Centre, away from everyday people, little Jarod played games to "simulate" the human actions involved in possible events - plane crashes, assassinations - to clarify their implementation for clients of mysterious, possibly nefarious purposes.

Then after 30 years, Jarod escaped, sensing the Centre's ill motives and wanting to set right social wrongs, since he might have unwittingly participated in some of them himself.

Out to get him back are his sympathetic Centre father-figure and psychiatrist Sydney (Patrick Bauchau) and the icily Emma Peel-ish coperative Miss Parker (Andrea Parker, coincidentally), so Jarod does his good deeds on the run. But he also wants to know who he is: Like the amnesiac of "Coronet Blue," he's working to learn who his parents are / were, and how he fell under the control of the Centre and its enigmatic "Prisoner"-like leader(s?).

While Jarod continues his "crusade for the little guy" (it's more delicious when you hear the stunning Miss Parker sarcastically sneer it) - he's always helping the homeless or saving Haitian refugees - "The Pretender" has become even more tasty with its intensifying focus on the internecine struggles at the Centre. The "X-Files" influence seems to be increasing by the week here - perhaps a bit too much in the shadowed offices where they're plotting Jarod's capture, and in the macabre presence of evil official Mr. Raines (Richard Marcus), always appearing out of nowhere with his oxygen tank in tow and sucking down air with a wheezing sound. Do we detect "The X-Files" cigarette-smoking man here? Especially when Raines explains his decline with the terse viewer-laugh line, "Too many cigarettes and not enough vacations."

There is wit in "The Pretender." Jarod's out in the world for the first time, remember, and every week he's experiencing the awe of discovery like an innocent out of the womb. Whether it's his initial encounter with ice cream, roach motels, pizza, Christmas, "Wheel of Fortune" or Spam - "Sex is always my favorite," Weiss says playfully, "it was better than ice cream" - Weiss has a nice way of playing the ingenuous wonder of those small moments against the eerily self-assured serenity and determination of his more critical mission.

The ensemble has blossomed through this first season, too, with the intriguing introductions of Mr. Raines and Miss Parker's "daddy" (Harve Presnell), a hard-hearted Centre honcho (oops, again), as well as Miss Parker's conflicted computer whiz Broots (Jon Gries) and Mr. Raines' animalistic operative savant Angelo (Paul Dillon), who's entirely too sick an entry for me (send him to "Millennium," please).

I'm much more interested in the gradual revelation of Jarod's ambiguous ties to Sydney and Miss Parker, growing ever deeper and more personal. There's enough child abuse here to keep Sydney working for years. Miss Parker isn't sure who she is, either - and her childhood relationship with Jarod has been hinted at (she gave him his first kiss). We've also learned Sydney has a twin brother who's been comatose for years since an auto accident after the two colleagues argued about the Centre's "ethics." As Jarod has been on his own quest for family and justice, he's been keeping his two pursuers on a sort of backwards leash, dropping evidence for Miss Parker about her mother's mysterious death years earlier and devising a medication to help Sydney's brother Jacob regain consciousness long enough to scribble down the crucial clue - SL-27.

Last Saturday, it paid off with sub-level 27, a hidden floor of the Centre that may contain clues to "the children." Jarod wasn't the only kidnaped kid, as we see this Saturday in the series' two-hour season finale (9 p.m. on WNBC / 4), when we meet an "evil pretender" who turns out to be Jarod's brother.

"The two-hour is real quintessential," says Weiss. "We've gone into new territory, and I believe next year we'll go through the roof. We're making it edgier, we're making it cooler, and hipper, and scarier, and funner."

Funner? OK. With that in mind, NBC has designed an online narrative game where we become operatives tracking Jarod. "The Pretender Adventure" runs through the summer with weekly updates, at www.nbc.com.

Have some catching up to do first? Check out a wonderfully informative fan site at www.intex.net/perridox/pretender.

Copyright 1997, Newsday Inc.
Diane Werts, Newsday, 05-13-1997, pp B61.