GET A KICK OUT OF `FOOTBALLER$' AND MODERN SHAKESPEARE.

Byline: David Kronke Television Critic

BBC America offers programming both high- and lowbrow this evening, with a series of Shakespeare plays brought assertively into the present day and the prurient new spinoff series ``Footballers Wive$: Overtime.''

``Overtime'' takes up where ``Wive$'' ended (apparently, a tie). As play resumes, soccer star Bruno (Ben Richards) takes back Lucy (Helen Latham), who survived a disastrous tryst with a lunatic, mainly because he needs her as an alibi in an accidental shooting.

His lot in life doesn't get any easier when two calculating teens show up at his door claiming to be his children from a previous relationship.

Meanwhile, the team has been purchased by former rock star Garry (Marshall Ball), who still hasn't gotten groupies out of his system and is ready to throw in the towel on his coke-addled son Oliver (Travis Oliver). Garry decides to give his son another chance, mainly because it'll give him more opportunities to cozy up to Oliver's manipulative girlfriend Anika (Georgina Mellor), whom we meet doing things with a vacuum that would likely invalidate its warranty.

If that's not enough, there's always Amber (Laila Rouass), whose husband's corpse isn't even cold before she's plotting a relaunch of her music career and setting her sights on Garry -- or, at least, his millions.

``Footballers Wive$'' indeed works overtime in concocting salacious, craven and outsized behavior. Were it any more a guilty pleasure, it'd be doing hard time in the slammer.

On a different note altogether is ``ShakespeaRe-Told,'' a series of films contemporizing four of the playwright's plays, jettisoning their dialogue for a modern idiom just as films like ``Clueless'' and ``10 Things I Hate About You'' have.

They hew, however, more closely to Shakespeare's original plotting, which can be a liability: In tonight's offering, ``Much Ado About Nothing,'' it seems fairly unlikely that a TV station's sleepy security detail would go on location at a wedding party for two of the evening newscast's personalities. Nonetheless, Damian Lewis and Sarah Parish -- as bickering anchors who have noisily eschewed love, though everyone knows better -- have droll fun in their roles.

Next week, ``Macbeth'' is moved to the high-stakes world of celebrity chefs, with James McAvoy starring as Joe Macbeth, a temperamental, Gordon Ramsay type. Ramsay's name is cleverly used here as ``Macbeth'' itself is used superstitiously by stage actors -- a name never to be spoken aloud.

Macbeth and his scheming wife, Ella (Keeley Hawes, in a wickedly sensual and sinister turn), plot to conquer the restaurant owner basking in his chef's reflected glory. Naturally, things go very bad indeed. ``Macbeth's'' ominously clairvoyant witches are cleverly reimagined as garbagemen who empty the eatery's waste bins.

As unlikely as it might seem, ``The Taming of the Shrew'' (premiering Aug. 27), a piece now routinely decried as sexist and outdated, is one of the series' highlights, thanks mainly to Shirley Henderson's wonderful performance as Kate, a harridan of a politician with no control over her temper. She opts to get married merely to advance her political career, only to see it be threatened with an abrupt end when her colorful fianc(hrt) (Rufus Sewell) -- ``He's just an unstable, unbalanced exhibitionist who needs someone to think the world of him,'' she's told, too late -- turns up at the wedding in attire more appropriate for a brothel.

Henderson is a tiny ball of tightly wound vitriol whose eyes evoke laughs in far softer moments; she manages to humanize a caricature artfully.

Only ``A Midsummer Night's Dream'' (airing Aug. 20) fails to engage.

As the play is pure fantasy in the first place, placing it in present-day requires little resourcefulness, and there's an irritatingly twee quality to this version of Shakespeare's tale of star-crossed lovers, fairies impishly misapplying their magic and happy endings for all. It's one of the few productions I've seen of this where, in the end, I really did wish it had just been a bad dream.

David Kronke, [phone]

david.kronke(at)dailynews.com

Footballers Wive$: Overtime - Two and one half stars

What: More soapy stories involving British soccer stars and their assorted paramours.

Where: BBC America.

When: 7 and 10:30 tonight; thereafter, 7 and 10 p.m. Sundays. Times may differ for satellite subscribers.

In a nutshell: Sudsy, sexy and silly.

ShakespeaRe-told - Three stars

What: Contemporized iterations of Shakespearean classics.

Where: BBC America.

When: 8:30 tonight; times may differ for satellite subscribers.

In a nutshell: A mixed, mostly entertaining bag of Bard adaptations.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Travis Oliver, left, Georgina Mellor and Nicholas Ball prove that ``Footballer$ Wives: Overtime'' is all about scoring.

(2) Billie Piper, left, as Hero, Damian Lewis, front, as Benedick, Sarah Parish as Beatrice and Tom Ellis bring ``Much Ado About Nothing'' into contemporary times.