`VALENTINE'

The CW's other entry, the matchmaker comedy Valentine, has a much frothier surface than Easy Money: A family of ancient Greek gods living in Los Angeles tries to match humans with their soulmates. First project: Madonna- and Charlie Chaplin-lookalikes who work for tourist tips outside Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. This doesn't seem like a tough assignment; they already like each other. ''You are the cutest Little Tramp Hollywood has ever seen,'' the ersatz Madonna coos to the fake Chaplin. (Really? What about Lindsay and Britney?)

But, as they did so often back in Greece, the gods screw it up. And team leader Aphrodite (Jaime Murray, last season's resident psychopath on Dexter) warns everybody that the next stop is the unemployment line: ``Every year we attract fewer and fewer clients. Pretty soon the fates will lose faith in us altogether and stop sending people our way.''

That might seem like a cheap ploy to introduce an element of phony suspense, but Valentine is genuinely (and sometimes amusingly) colored with a horror of modernity, the same future-shock angst that causes fearful Luddites to rail about Frankenfood and global trade. ''Back in the day,'' broods Aphrodite, bemoaning the difficulty of her job to a human, ``a girl rarely traveled more than two miles from the spot where she was born. There'd be four or five single men and you'd marry the one with the least pox. . . . But then you people had to go and invent computers.''

I'm not sure they have firm opinions about the pox, but I'd guess most 90210 fans are likely to regard Valentine's periodic rants against cellphones, the Internet and cable TV as something close to sacrilegious. Even so, Valentine in small doses can be goofy good fun, and there are enough hot bods -- including Autumn Reeser of The O.C. as the Oracle of Delphi's handmaiden, Kristoffer Polaha (Mad Men) as Eros and Robert Baker (Leatherheads) as Hercules -- to soothe even the deepest political paranoia. And how are you not gonna love a show where romance novels are dismissed as ''mushy, gag-me Nora Ephron crap''? That's like, worse than the pox.

Glenn Garvin is The Miami Herald's television critic.

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