Ah, out with the old, in with the new. The television season is dead, long live the next television season. And to prepare for it, I’m going to review new shows as the pilots become available.

Rules of Engagement; CBS, TBD (Midseason Program)

The press release calls this, “a comedy starring Patrick Warburton from Adam Sandler’s production company that follows two couples and a single guy as they navigate the jungles of dating, engagement and marriage.” I call it average.

That’s a shame, too; Patrick Warburton is one of my favorite actors. From Dave’s World to The Tick, this character actor always delivers (yeah, it’s always the same character, but it’s a great character). In this show, though, he’s left to fend for himself most of the time.

Paulo Costanzo, Patrick Warburton, and [unknown]

We first meet Adam (Paulo Costanzo, “Michael” on the ill-fated Joey and listed in press releases as “Chris”) and Russell (can’t find a credit, which usually means the actor is scheduled for replacement) in a diner, where Adam announces to his confirmed-bachelor friend that he’s moved in with Jennifer, and proposed. Insert standard, “are you nuts?” scene here; yeah, you can write this one yourself and have it as least as funny.

Next we cut to the older married couple; Jeff (Patrick Warburton, “David Puddy” in Seinfeld) is trying to balance the checkbook, and it seems Audrey (Megyn Price, “Claudia Finnerty” in Grounded for Life) forgets to put her checks in, “the thing,” which requires it to be, “balanced…ish.” Then there’s forgettable domestic stuff, and we switch back to the newly-engaged couple.

Ok, let me skip a whole lot of expected scenes where the older couple tells the younger couple how things are going to be, the younger couple begins to have doubts, which are of course resolved by the end of the episode (with a possible problem manifesting itself as David Letterman). There are some funny lines (although not as funny as the laugh track thinks they are), and as I mentioned any time I can watch Warburton wry-dry his way through a scene (”No cake…”) is a good time, but the situations are contrived and the characters just aren’t very interesting. I wasn’t a fan of Costanzo on Joey (although in his defense I wasn’t a fan of Matt LeBlanc’s by the time this embarrassing excuse for a sitcom was finally put out of its misery, either), and don’t like him much more here. The “doe-eyed” takes work even less well here than on the old show. And the rest of the cast, no matter how hard they try, simply cannot elevate the writing above the painfully average. Like I said, there are some laugh lines here, but none we haven’t heard before, written and performed much better.

Bottom line, this show, while unoffensive enough, isn’t going to revive the moribund sitcom genre. After a few weeks of the same-old-same-old, I’m afraid this show is headed to that great laugh track in the sky.