FALL TV Not wild about ‘Wilde’

“Running Wilde” premieres at 9:30 tonight on Fox.

REASON TO WATCH: If you loved Will Arnett as Gob in “Arrested Development.”

REASON NOT TO: This show is — oops, not allowed to say that in the newspaper. Sigh. Lemme think. Something else, something else ...

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Arnett plays a lovable — sorry, loathe-able — rich layabout more naively self-obsessed than, well, humanly possible. Keri Russell is his lost love, the daughter of a housekeeper who has matured into a — how can I say this? — daffy environmental activist. He wants her back, so he tricks her into moving into his mansion with her daughter, Puddle, who narrates the series. Did I say she hasn’t spoken in six months?

CHARACTERS: See how annoying all my verbal backtracking is? Welcome to the pilot of “Running Wilde,” where self-satisfied characters edit their sentences on the fly, while declaiming as if speechifying rather than speaking to the person next to them. Everything in this half-hour from “Arrested Development” auteur Mitch Hurwitz is contrived — zillionaires throw “Price Is Right” theme parties? — to be cute and quirky. Arnett’s tics fitted fine as a piece of “Arrested Development’s” dysfunctional family puzzle, but he’s too intense to wear well as a series lead. Poor Russell is just out of her element acting wacky.

BOTTOM LINE: There’s not a whiff of actual life here, no grounding character like “Arrested Development’s” Jason Bateman. There’s just frantic, false and tiresome.

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