'Angela's Eyes' an open-and-shut case

What do G-women want?

The truth, apparently.

Lifetime, the women's television network best known for direct-to-cable movies like ``12 Hours to Live" and ``Moment of Truth: Stalking Back," adds another police procedural to its lineup with the unintentionally hilarious ``Angela's Eyes," a leaden new series about a human polygraph working for the FBI. (It joins ``The Division , " a show about five female flatfeet.)

Like ``The Division " gals and LAPD interrogator Kyra Sedgwick in ``The Closer," soap opera vet Abigail Spencer plays an ambitious, empowered career woman whose career happens to be fighting bad guys .

Angela Henson, a lithe, blow-dried brunette, joins the Bureau after discovering her parents are ``the two biggest traitors in the history of [the] country," a kind of latter-day Julius and Ethel Rosenberg .

OK, so mom and dad are moles. It's still pretty mean of Angela to show up at her father's prison cell for the first time in a decade only to treat him like Hannibal Lecter .

``I'd like a relationship with you," he says plaintively.

``Did you think about [our relationship] when you were selling classified information to hostile governments?" Angela snaps back.

Ouch.

On the job, Angela works with the obligatorily disheveled techie, Dozer (Dozer? Wasn't that a character in `` The Matrix"?), played by Joe Cobden, and the obligatorily African-American partner, Leo , played by Lyriq Bent . Angela, Dozer, and Leo hang out in a handsomely appointed concrete bunker where they order each other around -- ``I want to know everything about her, down to the very last detail!" -- and make shrewd observations about the current case. In the pilot Dozer actually says ``The plot thickens."

As the show opens, Angela walks unarmed into a terrorist safehouse to prove her bona fides to her partners . When a scruffy Middle Eastern man puts a gun to her temple, Angela looks him in the eyes, counts his blinks, and tells him he isn't a ``trigger-puller."

Forthcoming installments have her battling drug dealers, celebrity-stalkers, and adulterous politicians. Frankly, I can think of better uses for a human lie detector. Why not put her in a room with Matt Amorello , the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman, and ask about the Big Dig tunnels ? Or ask Manny Ramirez why he skipped the All-Star Game?

Instead, in the pilot we get Angela and company tailing a Scott Peterson -like businessman accused of murdering his wife and dumping her body. We also get romantic interludes -- it doesn't take the show's producers more than 10 minutes to get Angela in bed with Mr. Big. On ``Sex and the City," it would take a few episodes to find out the hunk was lying; Angela knows immediately, with the predictable consequences.

Dysfunctional sex life. Estranged parents. Flaky partners. Welcome to the genre, Angela. You'll find friends here.

Of course, Sedgwick in ``The Closer" and Jennifer Garner in ``Alias" aren't under suspicion of treason because of their parents. Listen to Angela complain about the pressure: ``When I bought these shoes, I was like, `Do these look like espionage pumps?' Can I help it if Russian-inspired styles are in this season?"

Can we help it if ``Alias"-inspired girl power is in this season? Nope, but we can laugh at it.