His new form places him in opposition to the evil Dr. Anton Arcane (Chapman), who delights in transforming people into inhuman monsters, just because he can. Arcane commands great wealth, super science and armies of heavily armed mercenaries. The Swamp Thing lurks behind ferns and soliloquizes about good and evil. If you haven't seen the series, you're just gonna have to take my word for it when I assure you that Arcane never manages to gain any real ground. Frankly, I think he's holding back.

Various people living around the Swamp, including Tressa and Will Kipp (Myers and Garrison , respectively) and the lovely Abigail (Kari Wuhrer) find themselves caught in the crossfire, and are often menaced by the fallout from Arcane's evil schemes.

The usual M.O. is for the forces of darkness to gather around them and for the Swamp Thing, watching the developments from behind another bush, to take in the situation and then lumber into action. Somehow that action never amounts to very much, because the staging is consistently beyond awful. In one of the later episodes, an enemy of Arcane empties his machine gun at the mad scientist while Arcane and his minions fire back; the crossfire goes on for long minutes, cutting from one angle to the other, with no establishing shot that situates the antagonists in respect to one another and thus no provisional illusion that either side's in any real danger. This goes on for long minutes on end, with nobody being hit. The audience remains too painfully aware that Arcane and his enemy probably filmed their scenes on different sets, on different days ... and that the Swamp Thing, watching from behind another fern, might not have met either of them.

Evil cannot defeat the power of ... ferns

There's a certain level of artistic intent behind the show's reluctance to give us too many clear shots of its titular protagonist, which is entirely appropriate given his mysterious nature and the spooky nature of the ecosystem that provides him both name and home. To that end, the series manages some impressive shots of the Swamp Thing, lurking behind or emerging from forest cover, that are as close as the enterprise comes to the legitimately spooky.

But let's be real here. The show really hides its Swamp Thing because it takes time to get him in and out of costume and because he's far from impressively mobile when circumstances require him to play action hero. There are many scenes where subsidiary bad guys need to actively position themselves within his reach in order to be defeated by him. Durock's gravelly line readings are OK, but all of his physical business comes across less as acting than as enduring. It's no wonder that he often seems to be occupying a separate space from his fellow performers. His reaction shots often seem so disconnected from anything he's supposed to be looking at that it's easy to get knocked out of the story, just wondering if they were all filmed at the same time.

At that, Durock is not significantly worse than any of the well-meaning, well-scrubbed thespians not burdened with moss and muck. Everybody's line readings are consistently off, throughout the series. Lines as simple as "I'm going to take a walk in the swamp" sound as though they were learned phonetically. Nor does the actual series star, Mark Lindsay Chapman, an actor who achieved his greatest early notoriety when he won and (because he shared his first and last names with the singer's assassin) subsequently lost the plum role of John Lennon in a TV biopic, ever really light up the screen as the sinister Arcane. He has some charisma and some physical presence, but that's about it, and his actual level of achievement (in this production, at least) is about as low as everybody else's. It's certainly no star turn, even if the series seems to think so. Combined with lackluster scripts, the results are woefully dull.

In the end, Swamp Thing: The Series belongs to that subset of comic-book dramatizations that puts fans of the original four-color versions in the position of having to assure the uninitiated that the characters aren't as stupid as their live-action versions make them seem, and are in fact far deeper, cooler and more interesting when encountered in print. Howard the Duck? Definitely. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Oh, God, yes. Swamp Thing? ... Ya gotta take our word for it, nonbelievers. There was a hell of a lot more to that guy, as created by Wein and Wrightson and as later brilliantly reimagined by Alan Moore, than merely lurking behind ferns.

Oh, and by the way? The series was filmed in Florida, not Louisiana. And, boy, can you tell.

The DVD set includes interviews with Wein and Durock, both of which are so much more interesting than any of the 72 episodes that you might as well watch them and forgo the shambling dramatics entirely.