It�s a good time to look away from commercial TV. Most of last fall�s promising new shows are dead (The Tick) or about to be cancelled (Undeclared), and the midseason replacements are particularly unappetizing. (I can�t watch Fox at all for fear of seeing another promo for That �80s Show.) Fortunately, PBS is coming to the rescue � by giving us some leftovers from British television. Two contemporary dramas about British racism air over the next two weeks on Masterpiece Theatre, and a sex sit-com called Coupling premieres on these shores but already feels very familiar.

Masterpiece Theatre�s Britons Are Bigots festival begins with The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (January 21, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, at 9 p.m.), which is based on the true case of a black teenager allegedly stabbed to death by a gang of white thugs in 1993. Beating incalculable odds, the London police managed to top the neo-Nazis (who showed not a bit of remorse or regret) and become the true villains of the story. Within 24 hours of Lawrence�s murder, they were flooded with tips about the identities of the killers, but they so thoroughly botched the investigation (wasting time with the groundless theory that Lawrence was in a gang, for example) that no one was ever convicted of the crime.

Russell Baker, Masterpiece Theatre�s host, introduces the film by telling us, �The people you are about to see are all actors,� thus giving us just a soup�on of the condescending attitude the police displayed toward the Lawrence family. What Baker means is that the film is shot in the brightly lit, pseudo-documentary style we�re all familiar with (if not sick of) from shows like NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street. That style gives authenticity to the early scenes � including the shockingly sudden murder, at a bus stop � but gets wearying over two hours. A few too many scenes in Jamaica, where the Lawrences go to grieve without realizing that justice is slipping away in London, had me longing for the tighter scripts of American police dramas.

Still, I was thankful for the lack of Law & Order�type plot twists and red herrings, which can make a murder case seem like a fun parlor game. The absence of music also helps, as in the scene where emergency-room staff try to revive the young murder victim. �Is that okay, everyone?� asks the lead surgeon before she halts all activity by pronouncing a time of death. She�s following procedure, but the polite question seems obscene when put to a roomful of people who never met Stephen Lawrence before he lost consciousness for the last time.

Procedural racism may be the best description for what happens to the Lawrence family. The police do not appear to be white-supremacists, like Lawrence�s killers, but their ridiculously cautious investigation � which gives the killers plenty of time to intimidate witnesses � seems tied to a lack of empathy toward �those people.� In perhaps the most devastating scene, a police official makes an elaborate production out of sitting between Stephen�s parents (his mother is played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the daughter in the film Secrets and Lies) and sharing with them the results of an internal investigation into the detectives� handling of the case. After all that build-up, he confides that the police department followed the letter of the law and cannot be blamed for the killers� going free. The Lawrences know, and we all know from real life, that public servants are helpful only when they drop their official demeanor for a moment and address us as fellow human beings. At the end of this film, the Lawrences are still waiting for that to happen.

The Stephen Lawrence case is alluded to in Masterpiece Theatre�s next offering, a contemporary version of Shakespeare�s Othello (January 28 at 9 p.m.) in which the title character is the first black commissioner of the London police force, having been promoted over his best friend, Ben Jago (i.e., Iago). The script (without a single line in Elizabethan English) is by Andrew Davies, whose credits include a mini-series version of Moll Flanders, the film Bridget Jones�s Diary, and, most significantly, the Mystery! mini-series Mother Love, in which Diana Rigg played a mad divorcee who commits murder over an imagined betrayal by her son. Othello is almost as much fun, thanks in part to Christopher Eccleston�s Riggish portrayal of Ben Jago, who flashes a rat�s smile at the camera at each step of his plan to convince John Othello that he�s been betrayed by his beautiful wife, Dessie (as Desdemona is called here). John is played by Eamonn Walker, who has similarly straddled the line between cool dignity and irrational rage as Kareem Said on the HBO prison drama Oz. When he insists, near the inevitably tragic end, that his only crime was loving Dessie �too much,� he also brings up memories of O.J. Simpson.

This Othello is as topical as The Murder of Stephen Lawrence: as police commissioner, the title character tries to prosecute several white officers for beating to death a black suspect in their custody, and that case is skillfully woven into the Shakespearean plot. But the quick pace, playful camera angles, and soap-opera dialogue (particularly Ben Jago�s catty aspersions on Dessie�s virtue) make Othello too entertaining to serve merely as a civics lesson.

THE ALL-WHITE BRITISH SIT-COM COUPLING tries very hard to be entertaining, but unlike Ben Jago, it can�t hide its calculating nature. Airing in Boston Thursdays at 10 p.m. on Channel 44 and Saturdays at 11 p.m. on Channel 2 (beginning tonight, January 17), Coupling follows the romantic adventures of six attractive, 30ish men and women in fashionable London, and it�s clearly patterned on such American sit-coms as Friends � the kind of ensemble show that generally takes a few dozen episodes to get off the ground. The first few installments are mildly amusing, but they�re packed with moments that invite unfavorable comparison with Seinfeld. Wrinkle-phobic Sally (Kate Islett) declares that the human face can accommodate a limited number of smiles per lifetime and tries to flatter a man by saying, " You qualify for my elasticity " (just as Seinfeld�s Elaine, with a limited supply of her favorite contraceptive, decided whether suitors were " spongeworthy " ). There�s a woman who vetoes her boyfriend�s attempts to dump her, and a man forever embarrassed that a friend saw his " shrinkage " after he skinny-dipped in cold water (both recalling misadventures of Seinfeld�s George); there�s cute terminology reminiscent of American sit-coms ( " unflushables " are lovers who are particularly hard to get rid of). A few plot threads go even farther back: a scene involving someone who�s unable to stifle laughter at a funeral isn�t going to make anyone forget the " Chuckles Bites the Dust " episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Even the best sit-coms are mostly made up of recycled ideas, but that only means that characters are more important than plot lines, and the Coupling ensemble simply isn�t that compelling. Like a jazz combo, a sit-com cast spends most of its time doing riffs on some very old themes, and a rough but distinct style (think Ray Romano) is often funnier than the bland competence we get here.

There are a couple of exceptions: �Unflushable� Jane (Gina Bellman) has a few good moments, and Richard Coyle makes for an endearing loser � though another character greatly overstates the case by calling him a �strange and disturbing man� and �a pioneer of paranoia.� (Coyle also shows up in Othello as the modern-day Cassio.) The rest of the cast, at least so far, exists solely to dispense such one-liners as �A woman�s breasts are on a journey, and the destination is her feet.� That one would probably be funnier if you imagined Carrie saying it on Sex in the City.

AND SPEAKING OF SEINFELD: those of you with real lives probably missed Sunday�s installment of The Weakest Link, which featured actors who portrayed minor parts on the NBC sit-com. The winner was Phil Morris, who played one of the exceedingly few black characters on the crowded series, the Johnnie Cochran�inspired fast-talking lawyer Jackie Chiles. Morris�s victory was tiny compensation, perhaps, for gamely playing one of the more stereotypical roles on the show. The Weakest Link�s host, British dominatrix Anne Robinson, showed no emotion one way or the other as Morris rose to the top of the heap.