Batman: The Brave and the Bold

(Cartoon Network, Friday, Nov. 14, 7:30 p.m.)

Few superheroes have graced the big screen and small screen as often as Batman. Cartoon Network returns to the Dark Knight well for its new series Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Based on the DC Comics team-up comic The Brave and the Bold, the TV series features Batman — voiced by Diedrich Bader of Office Space and The Drew Carey Show — partnering with other heroes from the DC stable, including Green Arrow, Aquaman, Plastic Man and Blue Beetle.

The first episode, the only one available for review, features the Blue Beetle (Will Friedle, Boy Meets World), a character with a long comic-book history but not well-known to the casual fan. The story has Batman playing mentor to the latest Blue Beetle as the two heroes end up aiding an alien race in their war against supervillain Kanjar Ro.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold has a little more camp factor than the last few entries, animated and live-action, to the Gotham canon. While not as dark nor as intriguing as Batman: The Animated Series from the mid-1990s, The Brave and the Bold is worth a look for fans of the Dark Knight and will help introduce younger fans to other characters in the DC Universe.

— Eric J. Smith

Ricky Gervais: Out Of England

(HBO, Saturday, Nov. 15, 9 p.m.)

In between wrapping up his Emmy-winning HBO series Extras and making one of the few intentionally funny appearances on this year’s Emmy Award shows, Ricky Gervais taped a live performance at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The result is Ricky Gervais: Out of England — The Stand-Up Special, debuting this month on HBO.

Culled from material performed during his earlier U.K. tours, the special offers Stateside viewers an opportunity to see the stand-up side of Gervais — who’s best-known here for the aforementioned Extras and for creating the original BBC version of The Office.

Onstage, Gervais plays the part of egotistical celebrity, strutting across the stage between gulps of beer from an oil-can-sized Foster’s. His put-on insensitivity dares to target everything from cancer to the Holocaust. While some viewers will no doubt be offended or at least uncomfortable, Gervais is never threatening and his affable personality somehow delivers the politically incorrect goods without alienating his audience.

When the subjects of weight and sexual-endowment come up, Gervais turns the tables on himself, dropping the put-on braggadocio and revealing his stand-up persona’s insecure underside. He scores some especially resonant points at his U.S. audience’s expense as when, commenting on the “strength” of the dollar, he asks what it feels like to be a third-world country.

— George Vernadakis

Chase

(Sci Fi Channel, Friday, Nov. 14, 10 p.m.)

Sci Fi Channel’s newest series, Chase, is a silly attempt to mix the worlds of movies, video games and competition reality into one slick original series.

Dubbed the first live-action video game, the pilot episode of Chase features 10 “runners” who are dropped at the Port of Los Angeles and given an hour to navigate their way through a real-life video-game maze. Throughout the 60 minutes, the players are given certain tasks (such as stacking painted barrels revealing a picture that provides a prize), told to meet at various checkpoints and eventually are required to find their way to a secret finish line to collect the $50,000 prize.

Along the way the participants are pursued by several male and female “hunters” — who resemble the suit-and-dark-glasses-wearing agents from the The Matrix trilogy — who are called into play throughout the episode by series host Trey Farley. When “activated” (a nod to the robotic cylons in Battlestar Galactica), the agents seek out and eliminate participants by literally running down and tagging their prey. Similar to a video game, players can acquire weapons (electronic deflectors) to slow down the hunters.

While the slick graphics and futuristic camera visuals from the hunters’ point of view (similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character) give the show a video game feel, the series’ actual human participants aren’t very likeable or intriguing, like those in other competition reality shows such as The Amazing Race or Survivor.

— R. Thomas Umstead