‘Rock,’ ‘Champs’: Comedy Series That Are Worlds Apart

Two new comedies join prime time tonight. NBC’s “3rd Rock From the Sun” stars John Lithgow as lead alien in a sometimes-funny foursome from another planet on a research mission to Earth. ABC’s “Champs,” on the other hand, just plays like something from Pluto.

If you’ve ever wanted to see Lithgow doing Jim Carrey, catch “3rd Rock,” a broad, bumpy half-hour of sight gags and malapropisms from extraterrestrials--calling themselves the Solomon family--whom we see awkwardly adjusting to the human forms and habits they’ve adopted to hide their true identities from the earthlings they’re observing.

High Commander Dick (Lithgow): “Can anyone get your head to swivel to the rear?”

The group: “No.”

Dick: “Then how can you lick your back?”

Meanwhile, Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an elder cast into a squirt of a teenager’s frame, Harry (French Stewart) is an eccentric who sniffs bodies and Sally (Kristen Johnson) is having the hardest time of all as the group’s statuesque female. “Why am I the woman?” Sally complains. “Because you lost,” Dick replies.

Laughs rarely equal the sum of the gimmickry in “3rd Rock.” And mugging is not the strongest suit of that fine actor Lithgow, who was more controlled even as a transsexual in “The World According to Garp” than he is here, clowning shamelessly as an alien-turned-college-professor at times smitten with a co-academic, Mary Albright (Jane Curtin).

Yet the first three episodes do have their amusing moments as Sally learns the significance of her ample endowments, the male Solomons experience erotic stirrings for the opposite sex and Dick discovers vanity along with romance, darkening his gray hair and squeezing into a pair of leather pants to impress a female much younger than Curtin’s PhD.

Although it’s all just a little bit bent, you know that you’re definitely on this planet when the cameo guest in Episode 2 turns out to be Martha Stewart.

When things go badly for “3rd Rock,” it is able to fill the gaps with energy. The initial trio of unfunny “Champs” episodes gives you only gaps in its quest for humor in the repetitive reminisces of four poker-playing former members of a 1973 college basketball team (Timothy Busfield, Ed Marinaro, Kevin Nealon and Paul McCrane) and their coach (Ron McLarty).

This is a dumb-and-dumber guys comedy, the superior creature here being Linda (Ashley Crow), bemused, gently grousing wife of Tom (Busfield), a one-dimensional palooka whose activities appear to consist entirely of shooting backyard baskets with his pals, sifting through old baseball cards and ruminating about the good old days. He is the only member of the group still successfully married, but what does this guy do for a living?

The apparent theme here is that males don’t express emotions or communicate verbally (the premiere does offer a glint of wit when the former teammates do a guy-bonding thing and affectionately paw at one another).

Episode 1 introduces you to these bricks, Episode 2 finds Linda trying to mate them with a single friend (Wendie Malick of HBO’s “Dream On”) and Episode 3 has Vince (Marinaro) scratching for money to send his son to art school and Marty (Nealon) dopily shadowing his ex-wife because she’s dating a handsome waiter.

Although the latest episodes vary the sights and accelerate the pace, the show’s male characters are as unrewardingly spatial as they are in the premiere, making you wonder how they lick their backs.

* “3rd Rock From the Sun” airs tonight at 8:30 on NBC.

* “Champs” airs tonight at 9:30 on ABC.