‘Everything’s Relative’ Stumbles as It Treads Comedy’s Low Road

Don’t be fooled by the wildly appreciative, heehawing laugh track. NBC’s new “Everything’s Relative” appears to be a comedy you can watch with a straight face.

It’s a sitcom of unclear intentions, pinballing from broad to maudlin, with Kevin Rahm playing a comedy writer named Leo who is incapable of rendering a life script that will free him from his smothering divorced parents and only sibling. His grating kazoo of a brother, Marty (Eric Schaeffer), is a surgeon who wouldn’t know a scalpel from a scallop. His clinging mother, Mickey (Jill Clayburgh), is a therapist who needs therapy and can’t bear separation from her sons. And his father, Jake, (Jeffrey Tambor), is a babe-watching narcissist who imagines himself an irresistible hunk.

When these irritating characters get together--yuck!

The parents and Marty spend the premiere wallowing in their neuroses, while the vanilla Kevin plans a party celebrating his brother’s coming third marriage. There’s a nice touch tonight when Kevin fantasizes Jake being the tyrannical father in “Shine,” and the second episode ventures a bit beyond formulaic lines with “Rashomon”-like flashbacks to an event in the brothers’ youth.

More representative of the lowbrow humor, though, is an argument Kevin and Marty have over a piece of cake.

It’s hard seeing this as anything but a stunning career U-turn for Tambor, so brilliantly nasty and two-faced as Garry Shandling’s insecure, dark sidekick, Hank Kingsley, on HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” There’s no reconciling that striking work with tonight’s one-dimensional Jake, affirming the huge debt actors owe good writing.

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* “Everything’s Relative” airs tonight at 9:30 on NBC. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children.)