‘Romantically Challenged’ is a sweet, but airy confection

To every generation are born multiple sitcoms in which single people sit around talking about love and sex and other things they are not getting enough of or are getting a lot of but of the wrong kind.

“Romantically Challenged,” which premieres Monday on ABC, is one of these. It stars Alyssa Milano as a person. Who has friends. (Three friends, exactly.) Her character’s premise is that she is single after a very long marriage and has begun to wade really for the first time in the dating pool. The series — created by Ricky Blitt, who also created Rob Corddry’s short-lived (and stranger than this) “The Winner,” with Man of a Thousand Sitcoms James Burrows as director and executive producer — is not a total disaster. (Broadcast-network sitcoms attached to James Burrows rarely are.) But it is not what I would call good.

It is middling, though one might argue that its very not-bad-not-goodness represents an existential net loss: Your time should be worth more than this, ideally. It is the sort of show that makes your head hurt a little when you are forced to think about it seriously but might reward casual attention — or inattention — with the kind of white-noise brain massage many of us turn to TV for. There is, at least, no yelling in it, and the attitude is sweet, not sour.

Those are no small things, actually, in this wicked world, and the show is not without its pleasures. Milano is charming as the socially naïve Rebecca, and as her rather less naïve sister Lisa, Kelly Stables sparkles nicely. Kyle Bornheimer’s Perry, whom press materials oddly describe as “a rugged man’s man” when he gets lines of dialogue like “Let’s raise some heck” and “Run, don’t walk, to the Pittsburgh Museum of Applied Arts,” has in fact an interesting softness about him.

The setting is, indeed Pittsburgh — as locally re-created, three-camera style — which is only meaningful in that it frees the characters from bigger-city ambitions: They don’t have to be or to want anything glamorous. Shawn, played by Josh Lawson, is a writer, but there’s nothing glamorous about him, or apart from his owning a laptop, anything that would make you believe he’s a writer. Lisa, the wild girl, teaches kindergarten.

As people in sitcoms do, and do only in sitcoms, they name the things around them, as a way of representing familiarity. These characters use “guy” a lot, as in “Hot Guy David,” “New Waiter Guy,” “Future Mr. Guy I Had Sex With Twice.” And as people in sitcoms also do, they spend a lot of time at the same eatery-drinkery, where they don’t eat or drink anything.

This will tell you where we are. The subject is one-night stands.

“I’ve never had one of those before,” Rebecca says.

“You haven’t?” Shawn says. “I’ve never not had one.”

“There wasn’t a lot of one-night stands going on in junior high, you know,” says Rebecca, referring to the last time she was actually single.

“Speak for yourself,” Lisa says.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com