NY POST/LINDA STASI...
"Knights of Prosperity"
WEDNESDAY at 9 PM on ABC
CAUTION: This review was written by a person in the final stages of
shock.

Why am I in this precarious medical state? Because TV made me laugh,
that's why.

Yes, in a year when the funniest thing on TV was watching Katie Couric
delivering the news in "when librarians go bad" outfits, I'm thrilled
to report that an actual sitcom, "Knights of Prosperity" had me
laughing out loud.

And this from a mid-season replacement that was shoved off the fall
lineup.

"Knights" is about a toilet-scrubbing night janitor from Queens named
Eugene Gurkin, (Donal Logue) who can't take being a poor schmo anymore
and decides to get a crew together to rob Mick Jagger's apartment.

This happens after two events push him over the edge of the bowl.

First, Gurkin, depressed, asks his colleague-in-toilets for some words
of wisdom and the guy snarls: "Wisdom? Who do you think I am - Morgan
Freeman? I been drunk since the bicentennial." He then promptly drops
dead.

Gurkin then goes home to his miserable apartment, and watches the
fabulous Mick Jagger showing off his equally fabulous crib on E! News.

Pushed to the limit, Gurkin tries to enlist all of his loser friends in
his criminal enterprise - and there hasn't been a ragtag bag of losers
this bad since "Animal House."

Only three others want in: Gorishanker (Maz Jobrani), a-much married
Indian cabby; Squatch, (Lenny Venito), another janitor; and Rockefeller
Butts, (Kevin Michael Richardson), a fatty night watchman at a Jewish
goods warehouse.

While every single actor is perfect and perfectly funny in his role,
every time Richardson opens his mouth, I nearly spit my Weight Watchers
fat-free snack food all over my desk. The guy is brilliant.

Into the crew also comes Louis (Josh Grisetti), a loser of a
communications major who is "hired" by the cabby as the crew's intern,
and Esperanza, (Sofia Vergara), a gorgeous waitress who Gurkin wants to
nail. (Good luck pal!)

Every week (and hopefully ABC will let this show get its legs) the crew
overcomes a hurdle or four to get to their goal of robbing Mick.

There's a joke in the first episode about Gurkin naming the crew "The
Knights of Prosperity," which is an inside poke because the show was
originally called "Let's Rob . . . Mick Jagger" but was changed for
legal reasons. Personally I like the fact that the crew wears T-shirts
emblazoned with their new name which is strictly for their illegal
reasons.

Be sure to also catch the equally hilarious "Knights of Prosperity"
music video on "You Tube" with Richardson singing the horrible and
hilarious theme song.

A crew of losers out to rob Mick Jagger? I'm in.
* * *
By MARISA GUTHRIE
NY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
With the amount of ink dedicated to Mick Jagger's role in the ABC
comedy "The Knights of Prosperity," you'd think the pop icon was the
star of the show.

But it's Donal Loguewho gets top billing as night janitor Eugene
Gurkin, the leader of a raggedy band of amateur burglars who hatch a
zany plot to rob a moneyed celebrity to improve their station in life.

"It's a total blessing, ultimately," said Logue, "and there was one
minor drawback, which is if we got someone so famous it would be the
thing that people would focus on, but that's completely fine because
once the show is (on) everybody will get a sense of who it's about,
which is this group, and not even just Eugene Gurkin. It's such an
ensemble show."

Playing Gurkin's partners are Sofia Vergara, Lenny Venito, Maz Jobrani,
Kevin-Michael Richardson and Josh Grisetti.

Jagger makes a cameo in the first episode, which airs Jan. 3 at 9:30
p.m. But he's not in any of the subsequent 12, which have already been
filmed. Although that doesn't mean he couldn't be edited in later - if
he became available, said executive producer Rob Burnett.

The series was supposed to premiere in October. But ABC postponed it to
give it a bigger promotional push away from the crowded fall. In fact,
Logue credits ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson for
responding to his concerns about the network's (lack of) promotion.

He wrote McPherson an E-mail "wondering what's going on publicitywise,
and that's around the time that all of that dialogue [about postponing
the premiere] started."

Meanwhile, Jagger isn't the only star to make a cameo in "Knights."
Others who appear include Kelly Ripa and Regis Philbin, Ray Romano and
Sally Jesse Raphael.

But the show was never conceived as a celebrity stunt parade. Rather,
it's about a group of down-on-their luck clock-punchers who decide to
do something about their unfulfilling lives. Logue can relate. He used
to work the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift cleaning carpets at New York's
Regency Hotel.

"It's a pretty tough existence to live in New York," he said. "You're
not making much money. You're working when everyone else is sleeping,
and it just feels like, when life is just beating people down,
especially in the kind of weird, media-obsessed, celebrityobsessed,
wealth-obsessed country we live in, what if this guy got pissed off
watching yet another person prance around and brag about how much he
had and finally decides that he can change the path of his life?

"Unfortunately, the way he's chosen to change his life is through
crime, but so be it. It makes it funnier."
* * *
NY DAILY NEWS/DAVID BIANCULLI....
When ABC announced its 2006 fall schedule, one sitcom, starring Donal
Logue as a night janitor who recruits a bunch of blue-collar misfits
for a crime of opportunity, boasted the best title of the year: "Let's
Rob Mick Jagger."

But that was last year, and that sitcom never showed up. Instead, it's
now ABC's first new series of 2007. It arrives with what, 362 days from
now, may well be the worst title of the year: "The Knights of
Prosperity."

Yet this show, by any other name, still smells as sweet - and will make
you laugh as hard. Its time slot and midseason status may make it
harder to succeed, but creatively, "The Knights of Prosperity" has
delivered this season where so many new shows have failed: It
introduces a serialized story line with characters and a plot that are
different and likable enough to warrant a return visit.

Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman, co-creators of "Ed," team again for a
laugh-track-less comedy, and "Knights" (tonight at 9) has everything
you'd want from a new sitcom.

It has a hilarious extended cameo by Jagger himself, poking fun at his
image by taking viewers on an "MTV Cribs"-type tour of what is supposed
to be his Central Park West apartment. Twenty-year janitor Eugene
Gurkin (Logue), desperate to change his life after a colleague drops
dead on the job cleaning a toilet, sees Jagger on TV and convinces
himself that robbing Jagger of just enough to finance a dream of a
neighborhood bar would be tantamount to a victimless crime.

To pull off the job, he assembles a crew of blue-collar folks with
modest dreams of their own, and enough larceny in their souls to team
up as the Knights of Prosperity.

"They even made up T-shirts," says the theme song, and thank the TV
gods there's at least one new show with an actual theme song (music by
Paul Shaffer, yet, with clever lyrics by Burnett and Beckerman).

Eugene's quintet of fledgling criminal assistants includes two riotous
scene-stealers: Kevin Michael Richardson as deep-voiced, big-bodied
Rockefeller Butts, a warehouse security guard, and Sofia Vergara as
gorgeous, cocky Esperanza Villalobos, a waitress. The other players,
all scoring with funny lines and scenes, are Larry Venito as "Squatch"
Squacieri, another janitor; Maz Jobrani as "Gary" Subramaniam, a cab
driver, and Josh Grisetti as Louis Plunk, a communications student at
college who signs on initially thinking it's an internship on a movie
shoot.

The pilot is delightful, and a subsequent episode sent for review, with
Reiko Aylesworth making a potent TV return after her character died on
"24" last season, proves the show could have legs - and not just hers
and Vergara's. But starting next week, "Knights" goes up against
"American Idol" - and that's a bigger crime than anything this gang is
attempting.
* * *
A call from Mick brings satisfaction
By Ann Oldenburg, USA TODAY
The show was called Let's Rob Mick Jagger at one point. Then it was
shortened to Let's Rob....

Before all of that, it was Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum.

Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman, creators of what's now known as ABC's
The Knights of Prosperity, premiering tonight, said in a recent
teleconference they wanted a show with a premise that would be funny to
describe - not just a show about a group of people like Friends,
Seinfeld or Everybody Loves Raymond.

"We always enjoyed the idea of bank robbers," Burnett says, especially
"low-level guys trying to rob a bank." But they heard NBC was doing a
show called Heist, so instead of a bank, they came up with a celebrity.
At first it was Goldblum, but he was committed to another show.

Jagger was the suggestion of Steve McPherson, ABC Entertainment
president. "We loved the idea but kind of rolled our eyes at the notion
that could ever happen," Beckerman says. "But we went ahead diligently
and sent the script to Mick's production office. We were amazed when we
heard that Mick's partners had read and enjoyed the script. The very
idea of Mick reading something we'd written was pretty amazing to us."

Beckerman says they were told that Jagger wanted to chat with them
about it. "We were told this call could come from Mick at literally any
time of day or night. We got a call from Mick and his production
partner at 2:30 in the morning. We were sound asleep - in our own
individual homes."

Beckerman says Jagger "was really funny and friendly, and he asked a
lot of sensible questions about the show. We had a pleasant chat, and
the next thing we knew, he wanted in, he wanted to do a cameo."

But Jagger appears only in the first episode. After that, Burnett says,
expect other celebrity targets to show up: "Kelly Ripa makes an
appearance, Regis Philbin, Ray Romano, Sally Jessy Raphael, Dustin
Diamond. We have a good range."
* * *
Gallant 'Knights' faces uphill battle
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
You can't blame a sitcom for the company it keeps.

Yet most likely, bad companions will be The Knights of Prosperity's
undoing. A sweetly offbeat salute to oddball crooks, Knights is being
asked to prosper on a network that seems incapable of protecting it or
pairing it up. The few ABC sitcoms that were any good over the past few
years were out of step with public tastes and are long gone. And the
vast majority were awful, as witnessed by the flat-out loser premiering
tonight with Knights, In Case of Emergency.

Worse luck still, Knights is another ABC attempt to launch a serialized
sitcom, a particularly unpopular subset of a troubled genre. Having
folded Big Day's day-long wedding tent, ABC now expects viewers to
commit to a set of inept crooks as they attempt to rob the plush
penthouse of Mick Jagger.

How many viewers are going to trust Knights to pull off that caper when
they never found out why the wife vanished on Vanished, why the kid was
kidnapped on Kidnapped or why the day kept breaking on Day Break?

Still, Knights is worth the leap of faith, in large part because the
robbery is only one part of this good-natured tribute to the appeal of
the American dream, the get-rich-quick variety. Unlike the glum Smith,
Heist and Thief, the show immediately sets out to establish that its
Keystone crooks are, if not deserving, as least not undeserving - and
that they pose no real risk to Jagger's wealth and health. ("Certainly
he will not miss a few crumbs from his table of much plentifulness.")

Knights is brought to you by the folks behind Ed, who bring with them
Ed's gentle sensibility and knack for clever casting. Start with
appealing everyman Donal Logue as Eugene Gurkin, a janitor with an
unconventional life-improvement plan. But really, each of the Knights
is a sitcom hero: Esperanza (Sofia Vergara), the gorgeous ex-girlfriend
of a Colombian mobster; "Squatch" Squacieri (Lenny Venito), Eugene's
janitorial co-worker; Gourishankar, aka "Gary" (Maz Jobrani), an Indian
cabdriver; Rockefeller (Kevin Michael Richardson), a security guard
with a voice like Barry White; and Louis (Josh Grisetti), a fussy,
virginal college student.

As in many filmed comedies, at times Knights seems content to
substitute movement and scenery for comedy, but the brighter moments
compensate for those times when the show goes slack. The concern is
whether the concept can sustain a series and whether the series can
build on its propitious beginning.

No such long-term concerns with In Case of Emergency. It flops right
from the get-go. Indeed, if the TV gods are kind, we will never again
be subjected to a "meet cute" as repulsive as the one Emergency uses
for its opening scene: Harry (Jonathan Silverman) becomes reacquainted
with high school dream girl Kelly Lee (Kelly Hu) at a massage parlor as
she's giving him sexual release.

Life has not been kind to Harry and Kelly, and it's about to turn on
two other classmates. Just-dumped diet guru Sherman (Greg Germann) goes
on a televised eating spree, which includes hijacking a pastry delivery
truck. And then there's Jason (David Arquette), a scandal-plagued
accountant whose plans to kill himself go awry.

The reason behind this unconvincing convergence of events will be
obvious to any viewer. It's so all four losers can be tied together
into one big loser clump. It's kind of like Friends if every character
had been outlandishly contrived, every situation had been stripped of
every humorous moment, and every attempt at sentiment had felt cheap
and unearned.

What do you do in case of that kind of emergency? Run.