all aboard; From Moses at the Pharaoh's court to cool Rodeo Drive thieves to critters on Corfu, Joan Juliet Buck travels from B.C. to A.D. for the great new spring shows.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

In last month's column I made an error in loosely describing the polygamist Utah families in the HBO series Big Love as Mormons. The Mormon church condemns polygamy and has banned its practice since 1890. Big Love is not about Mormons but about families of renegade polygamists. While my review implied that these fictional families were outlaws, I was not specific enough in describing their actions as antithetical to the doctrines of the Mormon church. I regret that I might have caused offense through this lack of precision.

Television is not an easy medium for God. But for Easter, there's the Ten Commandments miniseries on ABC, a lush, straightforward version cast as if it were a very good party, with Naveen Andrews from Lost, Linus Roache (conflicted hero in the film Priest), Mia Maestro (cute girlfriend in The Motorcycle Diaries), the wonderful Paul Rhys (Chaplin's brother in Chaplin), and Padma Lakshmi (gorgeous Indian wife of Salman Rushdie). The Egyptian court life is rendered in bright, luxurious scenes full of weird detail. The child Moses, head shaved, eyes outlined with black, is taken down into a chamber with his stepbrother Menerith to watch a priest dig around a corpse's entrails, and annoys his tutor by asking, "Who made the gods?" The roiling dark sky that announces God looks just like the illustrations in my all-color Old Testament for children, except that this time, a mushroom cloud is brought in to help part the Red Sea. The adult Moses is played by the Scottish actor Dougray Scott, whose blue eyes and dark hair evoke a general air of Mel Gibson and with him the feverish flavor of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

By the time you turn to the slick new series Heist on NBC, you are primed to hear the main character's first words: "There's no virtue if there's no immorality." He then gets into an argument as to whether or not Mother Teresa believed in God. Of course he doesn't really care; he's just having one of those archly complex discussions that we see in the films of Quentin Tarantino. The fact that this character, Mickey O'Neil, is a thief and criminal mastermind is no odder than the fact that he is played by Dougray Scott, who was Moses a second ago in The Ten Commandments.

Mr. Scott here looks more like the Mel Gibson of Lethal Weapon, and his voice, no longer relaying the word of God in the desert, mouths the American vowels as if they were very large marshmallows. The premise of the show is that Mickey and his gang are going to break into three jewelry stores on Rodeo Drive during Oscar week. His adversary is a woman cop, Detective Sykes (former model Michele Hicks), who is at least twice as cool as he is. She thinks nothing of going undercover to neck with a gang leader, and has no problem shooting said gang leader when she has to. All of which happens very fast.

Directed by the cool-hunter Doug Liman, who gave us The Bourne Identity and last year's noisy, unintelligible Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Heist, described as a dramedy, is part Ocean's Twelve, part Pulp Fiction, a Socratic dialogue conducted entirely in jargon. When a bank robber interrupts Mickey and James's calm casing of a bank, Mickey murmurs, "Let's not get caught up in his drama." When Detective Sykes asks her fat lieutenant what's up, he launches into a discussion about "personal power" tapes and whether he should do more cardio. No one is on message; everyone is so ...