Next Day.CBS

Leslie Moonves is back, this time with the President of CBS Entertainment Nancy Tellem. The give-and-take between Moonves and Tellem is working, and they make it look unrehearsed. Anyone who thinks they are not a well-oiled machine is naïve, including the one critic who writes a column about how nonplussed Moonves is when reporters express concern over an announced Hitler miniseries. Moonves is never nonplussed. I, on the other hand, am perplexed: I think the story of young Hitler's rise to power is necessary, and cannot understand those critics who are questioning the validity of the project. But maybe since things are going well for CBS, there's little else to pick at.

The Eye Network has the one new show anointed the slam-dunk of the news season - CSI: Miami, starring David Caruso and Kim Delaney. In other words, with its pedigree and its acting talent, CBS will really have to go some to screw this one up. There are a few querulous questions about the appropriateness of the show Bram and Alice (it is doubly offensive -- sleazy as well as not funny), but more about that later.

Midday.

Without a Trace is a well-received drama about the FBI's missing persons unit starring Anthony La Paglia. I love him but don't love the pilot, mostly because I don't get how the show is going to play out over a full season. Seems to me there are three scenarios - the missing person is found, the missing person isn't found, the missing person is dead. Unless the creators make the circumstances more compelling than in the episode I saw, I'm not sure I'd watch every week, but I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. (Hank Steinberg, who wrote the beautiful Mantle-Maris HBO film 61, is an executive producer, as well as Jerry Bruckheimer)

There is no pilot for Michael Mann's new drama, Robbery Homicide Division. Rule of thumb: it's almost impossible to have a scintillating session when you don't have something to watch. Except in this case. RHD is nothing more than a series of clips, but its intensity jumpstarts the session. The eccentric, gifted star, Tom Sizemore, is a great get, and Executive Producer Mann ("Manhunter," "The Insider," Crime Story, Miami Vice) knows how to paint with moving (literal and figurative) pictures and badda-bing dialogue.

Yeah. Right. Like I said. Then there's Bram and Alice. (I have two thoughts: This is the kind of "what were they thinking" show that gives network development executives their stereotypical bad names. And.the otherwise talented Alfred Molina should shoot the person who told him sitcoms were the way to go.) Bram is a conceited, misogynistic best-selling author who hits on anything that's female - including his estranged twenty-something daughter, whom he doesn't recognize. Leslie Moonves parried the critics' objections to this awful pilot premise when he said: "If he hits on her next week, then you should be concerned." That was funny. This is not, even if it is from two very talented Frasier producers. I won' t embarrass them further by bringing up the lazy, tasteless Japanese, abortion, and retarded jokes.

Tuesday.

The aforementioned CSI: Miami was introduced to viewers last season in a regularly scheduled episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. David Caruso is too good an actor not to be working, and this should take care of that. Things didn't work out for Kim Delaney with Philly, but I anticipate the kind of tension between her and Caruso that made his NYPD Blue's John Kelly and her Diane Russell such indelible characters.