‘Maybe It’s Me’ Freshens the Family Sitcom Genre

Laugh tracks don’t exist in life. So no wonder raising kids is a lot funnier to TV comedy writers than when parents do it.

Ditto for children battling angst in homes featuring screwball mothers, fathers and other family members. Real world aside, in sitcom-land it’s a blast.

The latter describes “Maybe It’s Me,” a smart, witty new comedy from the WB so promising that it has “Malcolm in the Middle” potential. Like that Fox series, it freshens with originality a stock scenario that has its teen protagonist struggling with customary growing pains at school while reacting painfully to her family of straitjackets at home.

That includes a soccer-mad father, a semi-alert mother and a maternal grandmother whose ditzy comments infuriate the gruff paternal grandfather who occupies the same weird house. Add four bent siblings and pop-up graphics to this Munsters mix and you have a madcap premiere that succeeds from start to ending credits.

Created by Suzanne Martin, “Maybe It’s Me” has 15-year-old Molly Stage (Reagan Dale Neis) recording her life in her diary, as in her drop-dead distress at sighting her mother (Julia Sweeney) shuffling up to school in an oversized raincoat (“Today, I did something so terrible, it’s almost biblical. I denied my mother three times”).

Equally bizarre are those grandparents (Ellen Albertini Dow and Dabbs Greer), the brothers (Patrick Levis and Andrew Walker), twin sisters (Daniella and Deanna Cantermen) and especially Molly’s father (Fred Willard), whose thoughts are riveted nearly round-the-clock to the girls’ soccer team he coaches.

Molly too is preoccupied. While her guilt-ridden best friend, Mia (Vicki Davis), is self-conscious about being known at school as “the Jewish girl,” Molly focuses on impressing a dreamy boy she yearns to date. The subsequent dinner he has at her house is a deranged classic.

Although Neis and Davis appear a bit old for these roles, the entire cast is just grand, as is Martin’s writing, the only question being whether “Maybe It’s Me” can keep it up.

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“Maybe It’s Me” premieres tonight on the WB at 8:30. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).