Chemistry of Love

Feeling wild stirrings in your loins? Well, hop in that cold shower, you sexy thing…or pop PBS's Chemistry of Love into your VCR: this often soporific panel discussion, peppered with hot phrases like "long-term mating strategies," "obligatory parental investment" and "human sperm competition" will make you long for the (comparatively) randy atmosphere of a Trappist monastery. Hosted by Derek McGinty, this Valentine's Day-appropriate (if you want to spend an uneventful evening) anatomy of love's chemistry features three scientist/psychologist types and a humorist (Cynthia Heimel, author of Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth) who provides sporadic moments of levity. Viewers will discover many things that they already know: men stray more than women, love is like a drug (Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music informed us of same back in '75), and men respond more quickly to physical attraction while women like to assess the whole man (including a financial statement of net worth). Ok, I did learn some new trivia tidbits: some gorillas are homosexual, men prefer a .70 waist to hip ratio in their women, and Tibet is the only polyandrous country in the world (that means women can have more than one husband, and yes, I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know the word either). But more often than not, the scientific revelations here fall into the Common Sense 101 category: for instance, a man can lust after one woman, be infatuated with another, and have a deep attachment to yet a third. Hello! Don't these lab rats read the newspaper? That's not a finding, that's Bill Clinton's daily horoscope, for Cupid's sake. Not as lurid (or fun) as A&E's equally unrecommendable Sexual Attraction (VL-11/97), this offers a little better science but is also more likely to hook you up with the Sandman. (R. Pitman)