Ellen Gray: Make way for Margaret Cho's new show

THE CHO SHOW. 11 tonight, VH1.

FOR YEARS now, I've defended some "reality" TV as being a reasonable alternative to the several dozen sitcoms that used to crowd the airwaves, most of which seemed to be about friends living in Manhattan or average-looking guys with hot wives.

Possibly in Queens.

I don't really miss most of those shows, which deserved to be replaced, and, yes, even by slug-eating islanders with bad attitudes. But I've always felt a little sad about "All-American Girl," the 1994-95 series starring Margaret Cho as an assimilated Korean-American in conflict with her more traditional family.

Cho fans already know how that one turned out, since she eventually got a one-woman show from the horrors she endured from network suits who, having hired her, couldn't quite get past who she actually was.

And in those days, probably the worst they could say of Cho was that she was a little rounder of face than they'd expected.

Fourteen years later, she's acquired some baggage. Not to mention some tattoos. Any way you look at it, she's a lot more colorful than that "Girl" ever was.

But even if what actually aired as "All-American Girl" probably wasn't worth the fighting that went on behind the scenes, I'm now wishing that some network, somewhere, had tried again to turn Cho into a sitcom star.

Because maybe then VH1 wouldn't be trying to turn her into the Korean-American Kathy Griffin in "The Cho Show."

Like Griffin, whose "My Life on the D-List" antics on Bravo seem lately to have her propelled her to at least the bottom of the C-list, Cho's invited cameras in to her day-to-day life.

They're there to record her staged and not-very-scintillating interactions with her obligatory entourage, her friends and her parents (whose willingness to play along suggests she's either worn them down or hasn't fallen as far from the tree as she'd like to think).

Liking Cho, I wanted to like "The Cho Show."

Liking Cho, I couldn't.

It probably wasn't their intention, but the producers of "The Principal's Office" (9 tonight, truTV) have succeeded in capturing one reality of high school life that's often been overlooked on shows like "Gossip Girl" and "One Tree Hill" - the sheer tedium of it all, from the petty rebellions to the sometimes even pettier responses.

There are no doubt great challenges facing high school principals these days, but in this documentary series, which premieres tonight with back-to-back episodes that track the interactions of principals and students at high schools in New Jersey, Connecticut and Arkansas, the emphasis is almost entirely on discipline.

Kids get sent to the principal for mouthing off, texting in class and a variety of other unacceptable - but not exactly unexpected - teenage behavior, and in just about every case, the school's chief authority figure metes out punishment according to a set of rules as apparently immutable as federal drug-sentencing guidelines.

"I'm not worried about being fair. That's the policy," says the Booneville (Ark.) High School principal, who describes the handbook as "the Bible that we run the school by" when a girl who's hoping to leave because she's feeling sick protests his explanation that she'll be excluded from the prom as a result, because she's already been late to school a number of times.

His counterparts in New Milford, N.J., and Danbury, Conn., hew just as closely to their handbooks (though it seems that of the three, only Booneville offers students a get-out-of-detention option involving three swats from the principal's paddle).

Look, I'm a mother, and generally a pretty strict one. And once the nuns and I parted ways after elementary school, my own bad-news visits to principals pretty much ceased.

So it says something about the general humorlessness of the grown-ups occupying "The Principal's Office" that my strongest reaction was sheer relief that people like that were no longer the boss of me.

It's not exactly HBO's "Flight of the Conchords," but for music fans looking for something a little silly before the workweek starts, IFC's offering up "Z Rock" (11:30 p.m. Sunday), a series "based on a (kinda) true story" about ZO2, a heavy-metal band from Brooklyn, N.Y., that used to play children's parties to pay the bills.

Here's hoping the time slot's enough of a giveaway that this isn't one to tape for the kids.

Joan Rivers, who guest-stars as the aunt of the band's manager (Lynn Koplitz), is scary enough.

But it's the yummy mummies who end up cavorting with the band who could end up making you wish you'd stuck with the Wiggles. *

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