(FOX, Wednesday, 7,00)

Back to You stars Kelsey Grammer as a wind-bag of an anchor man, who, after working his way up from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis to Cleveland to Dallas and finally to LA gets canned and must return, all the way back down to the bottom, to Pittsburgh, where his co-anchor (played by the hilariously right-wing Patty Heaton) has been the entire time. Oh, and Fred Willard is the sports guy. I hate Fred Willard but fine, whatever.

Back to You, in short, sucks. Sure, there are moments that are nice. But there's so much of it that's so bad or so derivative. First: the news director's twenty five. You know what? I've seen Murphy Brown. The whole twenty five year old news director was done better then, twenty years ago. And while Ty Burrel is better here than he was as a one-dimensional skirt-chaser on CBS terrible Out of Practice, he's still nothing to write home about. He's still just as ass, looking to get ahead. Which pretty much describes all the characters.

Except maybe Kelsey Grammer's character. Oh, sure, he's the assiest of them all. The stupidest, loudest, most annoying. But, it turns out, the one-night-stand that he had with Patty Heaton's co-anchor the night he left town produced a kid, who's now 10 and Grammer's just learned about. This provided the one moment worth watching in the show, when the kid mouths to her dad (though she doesn't know he's her dad) "take me with you" because she's having a fight with her mom and Grammer just smiles. Warm, touching.

And not at all of a piece with the mostly hackneyed jokes that preceded it. A weird feature of the jokes jumped out at me: there'd often be a joke that was not funny and then a minute or two later, a joke of the same form that was funny, involving the same two characters and referencing the last joke. Which would be great, except for the fact that this second joke doesn't somehow make the first joke of the same form funny. It explains to me why you kept the first, shitty joke in the script, but that doesn't mean that was the right call.

Coming from Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, you'd think--you'd think!--they could've done better, but apparently not. And I've seen enough TV programs where the characters are just mean to each other "humorously." And that's the case here: everyone at the station hates everyone else and that's kind of boring. Well, everyone hates everyone else except for weather-girl Montana Stevens-Herrera, who is a whore and so only hates some people.

Back to You: FOX, Wednesday, 7,00. D.