It reads: "Some elements have been produced and/or edited for comedy."

If you plop a befuddled celebrity like the tattooed Motley Crue drummer into the rigid, conservative arena of academia, you don't need to pump things up for effect. The funny should just start to happen, right?

It's like putting a naked Lee and, say, Pamela Anderson on a boat with a camcorder - you know something interesting is going to happen.

But the newest reality show in which a crazed celeb is placed in the wild, like "The Anna Nicole Show" or "Being Bobby Brown" before it, must have been so unexpectedly drab that producers felt compelled to dig deep into their bag of editing and musical tricks to try and make it funny.

Well, they failed.

"Tommy Lee" is a waste of time, despite a good idea and a likeable wild man. Maybe they needed to cast Motley Crue frontman Vince Neil to give Lee someone to slap around. But wait, Neil already was in a reality show ("The Surreal Life," if anyone's counting).

The idea behind "Tommy Lee" was to drop the rock musician, who has a rap sheet nearly as thick as his tabloid scrapbook, into the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and watch what happens.

Not much, as it turns out.

In the pilot episode, Lee meets with the university chancellor and is warned not to trash the campus.

Judging by the way the first two episodes go, there's no danger of that.

When Lee must find a dorm roommate, the show's producers naturally team him with a nerdy-looking political science major, Matt Ellis. Not much happens there either, except that Lee transforms the small dorm room into a miniature palace complete with a widescreen plasma TV and his drum kit.

Then we follow along as Lee goes from class to class. But he has such a genuine desire to learn and is so well behaved in front of instructors, it turns out he's not that different from the rest of the students.

He meets his school counselor, who hooks him up with a chemistry tutor, an attractive blond graduate student - of course - who obviously has not seen Lee's infamous home sex movie (with Anderson).

The second episode isn't much better. Lee enrolls in the university's marching band and can't seem to keep time - even though he's the drummer for one of rock's biggest heavy metal groups .

The sad thing is that Lee is a natural for this kind of show because he comes off as a likeable and charismatic guy despite his reputation as an untamed rocker.

The problem is that when producers cut him loose, nothing really funny happened, so they manufactured artificial moments and edited them in the best they could with corny musical cues.

All we're left with are scenes of Lee talking to professors and students, interspersed with shots of giddy fans/students asking to have their pictures taken with him on campus.

Tommy Lee goes to college and flunks Entertainment 101. Somebody ought to enroll Pamela in some of his classes, just to spice things up.

School Daze

'Tommy Lee Goes to College' premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. on KSL Channel 5.

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Television columnist Vince Horiuchi appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at vince@sltrib.com.

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