New tonight: "Samantha Who?"

In a television season filled with everyday superheroes, Samantha Newly may have the most unusual superpower of all: She can completely forget her past.

Knocked into an eight-day coma, Samantha (charmingly played by Christina Applegate) awakens with total, perhaps temporary, amnesia as "Samantha Who?" a new comedy airing 9:30 ET Monday on ABC, opens. What's clear from the start is that whatever Old Samantha was in the past, it wasn't a life worth remembering. But apparently it involved a lot of booze and a man who's married to someone else. It also involved a mom (Jean Smart) that Samantha couldn't stand and a boyfriend (Barry Watson) she didn't love -- facts she apparently oblivious to before her coma. The objectivity that comes from observing someone else's life is available to New Samantha, and she uses it well, quickly figuring out that Old Samantha was living a lie in far too many ways.

This doesn't sound like the premise for a season-long show. (“Regarding Henry,” in which Harrison Ford plays a jerk who reforms after a brain injury, had a similar setup -- but it was only two hours long.) Leaving that aside, “Samantha Who?” actually gets better as it goes along. There's a lot of table-setting in this first episode, but I found myself enjoying a later episode, and Applegate is a big reason why. Turns out that Samantha isn't the only one who's learned some things along the way. The onetime Kelly Bundy of “Married … With Children” fame has matured since her last regular gig (the NBC sitcom “Jesse,” a train wreck that passed as a hit, for a season at least, thanks to NBC's then-artificially sweetened Thursday night ratings).

Applegate is so appealing here, in fact, that she makes me … well, forget everything she did before “Samantha Who?”

Comments

[Mark Jeffries]

In the revival of "Sweet Charity," Christina Applegate's likability and charm helped blind people from the fact that her singing voice is weak and that she can't really dance (in a show where Bob Fosse did the original choreography). If she could do this with a Broadway show, she'll carry this sitcom.

[The Pop View]

I was completely surprised by how much I liked the pilot and the second episode was good as well. Applegate is charming and the rest of the case is uniformly good as well. I only hope they can sustain the quality over time.