Michele Hewitson: Almost as good as it gets

The thing about comedy: you need a really good idea, or a really good character. Sounds simple? Ha, ha.

With Fawlty Towers you had a really funny character. No, you didn't, actually. You had a really despicable character - and a really funny cast of characters to enhance his ghastliness. That was funny. With Seinfeld you had a really good idea. And a cast of really despicable characters to enhance his ... We know how funny that was.

The trouble with TV3's new Wednesday night offerings I Hate Chris and My Name Is Earl is that all you have is a good idea.

Despite their intended flaws we're meant to like these characters. They're goofy, anti-heroes. The over-riding demand of these shows is that we love these two: they are idiots, but they are lovable idiots.

Fawlty, and Seinfeld, never asked you to love them. If you did, you needed therapy. Just like they did.

UKTV is re-playing, again, repeats of Men Behaving Badly. If you love Gary, you really do need help. Men Behaving Badly doesn't have the pure genius of Fawlty and Seinfeld, but it's as funny as hell..

Men love Men Behaving Badly because it gives them an excuse for laughing about men behaving the way they wouldn't dare to. Women laugh at it because it gives them an excuse for laughing at how men still haven't evolved. That's sexist on so many levels that it has to be funny. I guess that's a form of nostalgia.

I Hate Chris is set in the 80s. There's nostalgia, sort of, set in a place where crack meets family values meets a geek.

Maybe those Fame kids are better than the nerds. Maybe there's more to being a black kid than being able to play basketball.

The best characters are Mom and Dad. Mom is the ghetto snoot who doesn't serve instant coffee; she serves freeze-dried. Dad is into money. As in counting how much an uneaten bowl of porridge is worth. Chris gets to eat it. Chris gets all the crap. Chris is Chris Rock, the famous comedian. We know he'll get to grow up to become the famous comedian.

Is this show funny? Maybe if you find this funny: "Much like rock'n'roll, school shootings were also invented by blacks and stolen by white men."

Earl, like Gary, will never grow up. He's a deadbeat who discovered karma. He has a list of all the people he robbed - of money or dignity or, in the case of his even more moronic brother, a touchdown in a football game.

Earl had fixed it back in college days; he wants to fix it to make it right now. The plot is simple: every week Earl makes a right wrong. Along the way this is funny, and immoral means are employed to make wrongs kind of right.

At the end there is an, "aw, hell, these guys are bad bastards with big hearts" scene. This is probably all right but it is as cheesy as that stuff they squirt in really yucky sausages. There is nostalgia - for a time when even bad guys could go good.

In I Hate Chris there's nostalgia for a time when you could make racist jokes. But only if you're a black guy. Some of this is funny. How funny?

The laughs are mostly ones of relief that American sitcoms can, after the candy-dross that was Friends, still be a bit edgy. And, yes, there are morals. But The Simpsons, still the funniest, smartest show about the male species (Homer; Bart et al), has morals.

Chris and Earl are not those very rare things: really good sitcoms. But they are those almost as rare things: pretty good sitcoms. Well, they make me laugh.