CBS PINS ITS HOPES OF REACHING YOUNGER VIEWERS ON HEWITT

by Ken Parish Perkins
Star-Telegram Tv Critic

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Singer-Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt -- Hanes' perfect panty girl, Cosmo's former Fun, Fearless Female of the Year -- is a giggler, one of those people who say something that isn't particularly funny or even amusing but bursts into giggles anyhow. It's an idiosyncrasy that makes her charming and cute and a little irresistible, which, in Hollywood, where pretty, perky young things share the odd social sphere of being both commonplace and a hot commodity, often means employability.

Television, in particular, seems bent on making her a star.

Since she left Fox's family series Party of Five, projects have trailed Hewitt like a stalker, whether it was her own series, which quickly followed her Five stint (It didn't work and interestingly has been stricken from her bio) or a foray into teen movies: I Know What You Did Last Summer and Can't Hardly Wait.

Dressed in an off-white strapless dress, high heels and very long, very black flowing hair, Hewitt has come to meet the nation's TV critics to promote another series in which she stars. Mind you, it's a different kind of series for Hewitt, who plays a woman whose everyday conversations are often with dead people, and it's certainly on a different kind of network.

Ghost Whisperer is the replacement, if you will, for Joan of Arcadia, which CBS dumped after two seasons, some dogged devotion and an Emmy nomination. The show's slipping ratings midway through the first year were one thing. But slipping ratings among young people were something else.

CBS, still testy about being referred to as a network for geezers, is proud that the average age of its viewers has been dropping, and it's clear that Hewitt is yet another carrot to dangle before younger viewers who see a 60 Minutes correspondent and think "Granddad."

While the cast assembled for a panel, one Ghost Whisperer producer talked of how Hewitt, 26, "brings a certain cachet. ... She's the 21st-century girl next door." Another called the show "a bull's-eye for young people."

More power to CBS, if that is its aim. But as these projects often go when made from the outside in, the inside draws the short straw.

Ghost Whisperer has Hewitt but little else. And although co-star Aisha Tyler, who plays the star's go-to buddy, said the pilots are full of plot-setting and therefore unrepresentative, critics didn't seem to be wowed by the series' sappy, lightweight drama.

Hewitt's Melinda Gordon has the gift of communicating with the dead and uses it to help earthbound spirits, ghosts, whatever, move on. Unfinished business is what keeps the dead folks around, we're told. In the pilot, it's a soldier who died in Vietnam wanting to contact a son who was just becoming a father himself.

Hewitt is in nearly every frame, with tight shots, which is fine with her because "I love close-ups," she says, giggling.

Is Hewitt a believer? "I'm learning to believe in it every day as we do these stories," she said.

CBS certainly believes that Ghost Whisperer will become a Friday night must-see, pointing to a Gallup Poll that says one out of three young adults age 16 and older believe in ghostly spirits.

"It's something people want to talk about, have questions about, want to see on TV," Hewitt says.

Unlike, apparently, God.