Jonathan Storm: Gellar plays twin roles in 'Ringer'

Sarah Michelle Gellar returns to TV Tuesday night, seven years after Buffy slew her last vampire. She plays not one, but two, lead roles in a splendidly silly series called Ringer, premiering at 9 p.m. on the little CW. The network has three other new series, but Ringer, a cleverly convoluted suspense tale about identical twins, is the big one.

Not that it's going to be all that big, stuck on a descendant of the network where a large audience never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even though critics jumped up and down about it for six years. They adored it so much they gave it the Television Critics Association's second-ever Heritage Award for cultural or social impact, even though they still haven't gotten around to All in the Family or Hill Street Blues or The Cosby Show.

College professors adore it, too. When former Inquirer TV critic David Bianculli, who is now one of them, asked Gellar what she thought about Buffy being the subject of more academic books and papers than any other TV show in history, all she could say at first was, "Wow."

But Ringer is no Buffy, so that's enough of that. It is a cleverly constructed take on the old concept of the evil twin, a soap opera staple that dates back more than a thousand years through movies, books, and poetry.

Gellar plays Bridget Kelly, drug addict and prostitute. Gellar plays Siobhan Martin, New York society dame with a gorgeous contemporary white weekend house in the Hamptons. Who do you think is the evil one?

Six months sober, Bridget's trying to turn her life around, but she fears there won't be much of it to turn if she testifies against the dastardly chieftain of crime on, of all weird places, the Wind River Indian Reservation. This guy makes up for being small-time (there are only about 7,500 Shoshone and Arapaho on the whole Wyoming reservation) by being mean and ugly. He killed his own brother, we are told by some lawman as we gaze on the guy's grizzled countenance.

So Bridget klonks her police protector on the noggin and makes her getaway, also giving the slip to FBI guy Nestor Carbonell and his amazing eyelashes, and fleeing to the not-so-welcoming arms of her sister Siobhan in East Hampton.

Siobhan is not exactly proud of her low-life sister, telling her that husband Andrew "doesn't exactly know about you."

"About my visiting?" Bridget asks.

"About your existing," Siobhan replies.