One of the worst and most perturbing television shows on the Warner Brothers network, a little piece of schlock called "7th Heaven" might lose one of its stars. This, I learned while watching "Later Today" one of the worst and more perturbing shows on NBC which is a follow-up to "The Today Show" and airs as I'm leaving for the subway. Jessica Biel, it seems, is posing nearly nude in this month's "Gear" magazine and she looks damned good.

Florence Henderson (the woman from The Brady Bunch pretending to be a newscaster on "Later Today") was rather aghast, especially when they revealed Biel's reason for posing -- she wants to get fired. Henderson noted that an actor shouldn't want to get fired from a show, because it's hard to get work out in Hollywood. But if the show sucks, and 7th Heaven does suck, I think it makes sense for a young actor to want out.

Why does "7th Heaven" suck. Well, read this description from the Internet Movie database at www.imdb.com (I've edited it a little):

"This weekly television series introduces us to the Camden family, where the father is a local reverend, the mother stays at home, and the five children are at various stages of their education, from pre-kindergarten to high school. There is always a serious issue developed, from the importance of friendship, to dead-beat dads, to sibling rivalry, to love."

It is basically tripe for the consumption of social conservatives, an audience rightly ignored by television (because those people shouldn't be watching TV, they should be reading their bibles and cleaning their bunkers.) Biel, certainly a talented young woman, is probably worried about being typecast as a boring goody-goody. She's also probably annoyed with the subject matter of "7th Heaven," and any free-thinking young person would be.

I saw one episode (hey, I thought "Buffy" was on) and here was the plot: The father, our annoying reverend, finds a joint in his son's clothes. But things get complicated when the mother admits to smoking pot once in those crazy days before she met the conservative and grounding father who showed her Jesus and led her away from the heathens. The father is beside himself with rage and sadness. The mother is guilty for no reason at all. The son, it turns out, didn't even smoke the pot and it wasn't even his. The family was devastated.

There wasn't, of course, any look at the other side of the issue: that pot isn't that bad, that anti-drug laws and at best stupid and at worst a violations of basic human rights and that Moses smoked drugs in the Bible (he went into the desert, had an experience with a burning bush and came back saying he saw God... I've done that.) That was a joke.

But that's the problem with "7th Heaven." In the age of irony, here's a show that won't poke fun at itself or its beliefs. So I hope they do fire Jessica Biel because the girl deserves her freedom.

Florence Henderson, who also starred in a sickly sweet and moronic television show, doesn't know what she's talking about. Jessica Biel might have a lot more fun on the Indie film circuit and she might eventually make a lot more money. At the same time, she won't have to pretend to be a numbskulled conservative every week of her life. Henderson's dumbest comment, by the way, was a warning to Biel: "Think of Dana Plato."

Well, gee, I think a young woman with the talent and ability and drive to work on a weekly television series might be able to avoid the unfortunate Plato's fate. I mean, Plato was really a special case, right? Don't most people not have to worry about letting their lives spin out of control? Maybe I'm an optimist. I think Jessica Biel will do just fine on her own. Getting out of her current, putrid gig is essential to her not having to host a show like "After Today" when she gets older.

Michael Maiello is going to move to L.A. to audition for the part of the older daughter of the WB's "7th Heaven."