Television Review: Can You Wear Silly Hats With Your Cloak and Dagger?

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What follows is even funnier. Arriving for his first day at C.I.A. headquarters in suburban Virginia, the eager young spook Rick Martinez immediately encounters failures of security at the entry gate, where the gumbo he has packed for lunch trips alarms as potential weaponry. And to think that the stuff didnt even look that spicy.

As the catalyst for the action, Martinez is played by Freddy Rodriguez, whom you will recall from the embalming room on Six Feet Under. People who seem freakishly comfortable around formaldehyde arent those we necessarily imagine assuming the mantle of Maxwell Smart. Mr. Rodriguezs look of fixed perplexity doesnt make him the most obvious choice for comic material, but his anxiety accommodates the proceedings well here. He seems like the right kind of guy to get caught up in the wrong kind of mess.

Martinez has been aspiring to spydom apparently since birth. I have trained my whole life for a career with the C.I.A., he tells his boss, a stone-faced functionary played by Kurtwood Smith. When my brothers were at soccer camp, I stayed home and studied Arabic. When everyone else was dating, I was working at a firing range, getting paid in bullets, so I could train on semiautomatics. Martinez has ideas about the direction that his professional life will take that are quickly contradicted by reality.

For a protracted moment it feels as if Chaos is going to turn inventively into a C.I.A. satire completely under the influence of The Office. Youre thinking that the real crisis at headquarters will have something do with budget cuts that mean fewer laser printers for expense reports from trips made to the Milwaukee field office. This would be welcome. But it isnt long before weve descended into the territory of rogue agents, Sudanese rebels, near-death hostage situations, Cambodian heroin dealers and bizarre excursions into desert negotiation.

Chaos has had a long and troubled journey to prime time, dying for a period and then being brought back to life. The shows creator, Tom Spezialy, has said he was inspired by The Four Musketeers, but also by Mike Nichols, Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne. The shows jarring shift in tone suggests a touch of the film Syriana, as well, all of which leaves us with a hard-to-digest influence soup. Its as if a novelist were telling you that she wrote while under the spell of both Salinger and Nancy Drew.

It seems more likely that Chaos was slowly brewed into existence as a result of the success of Burn Notice, on USA, the sunny spy series set in Miami that has always managed to incorporate its dark passages astutely. A redemption drama about a former spy who does good works presumably to make up for all the unspeakable things he did in Bosnia, Tehran, Beirut you name it Burn Notice has behaved as if it barely wanted you to notice its politics. Chaos cant get there or at least it isnt there yet.

CHAOS

CBS, Friday nights at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Created by Tom Spezialy; Mr. Spezialy, Brett Ratner and Martha Haight, executive producers. Produced by 20th Century Fox Television in association with CBS Television Studios.

WITH: Freddy Rodriguez (Rick Martinez), Eric Close (Michael Dorset), James Murray (Billy Collins), Tim Blake Nelson (Casey Malick), Carmen Ejogo (Fay Carson), Christina Cole (Adele Ferrer) and Kurtwood Smith (H. J. Higgins).