MOCKED TRIAL

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Theo R. Smith, thirtyish and spirited, is the sort of aspiring actor as easy to come by in Los Angeles as a palm tree or plastic surgeon. His resume, impressively diverse, boasts appearances in everything from The Winter's Tale to Mike and Maddy while also listing his "special skills," among them stage fighting, bartending and body surfing. Like many of his peers, Smith names Martin Scorsese as the director he would most enjoy working with. "I'm a dramatic actor," Smith explains, "but I would never turn down a good comedy role."

By some measures, though, he already has one. Blessed with an uncanny resemblance to Brian ("Kato") Kaelin, Smith has won a recurring role as the Simpson houseguest on the O.J. Civil Trial, a nightly one-hour news program on the E! channel (airing weekdays at 8 p.m. EST), which not only provides analysis of the testimony in the Simpson wrongful-death lawsuit but actually has actors recreate verbatim chunks of the day's proceedings as well.

The idea for the O.J. Civil Trial came about when Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki barred cameras from his courtroom during the current Simpson case. E! had watched its ratings skyrocket during the network's gavel-to-gavel coverage of the criminal trial, and executives reasoned that the daily dramatizations would be the best way to give viewers their O.J. fix. "The re-enactments take people inside the courtroom," defends John Rieber, E!'s programming vice president, "and that's where they want to be." Indeed, the O.J. Civil Trial has doubled E!'s audience for the 8 p.m. time slot.

Anchored by E! news correspondent Greg Agnew, the show cuts back and forth between generally incisive commentary from a variety of legal analysts, including Charles Rosenberg, to the bizarre dramatizations. Each day E!'s in-court reporters take copious notes on the mannerisms and inflections displayed by the lawyers and witnesses in the trial. Then the reporters brief the actors, who act out the most pertinent snippets of the day with the aid of a TelePrompTer. Harshly lighted, and staged in a fake courtroom modeled to look like Fujisaki's, they seem neither realistic nor dramatic but rather like mini-episodes of the People's Court.

Is the network providing a public service? It might be, if the actors were not so goofily earnest in their delivery that real concentration on what they say is almost impossible. Is E!, on the other hand, affording viewers easy laughs? Certainly. Each day the fake O.J. (Stephen Eskridge; likeness: excellent) seems to get better at fiddling with his pencil and gazing intensely at the goings-on. When the faux Los Angeles Police Department criminologist Collin Yamauchi (Charlie Minn) said "phenylethylene test," it seemed funnier than any bit on Mad TV. Who needs cameras in the courtroom?

--By Ginia Bellafante