TV REVIEWS

Who says there’s nothing new on TV?

“Together We Stand,” which premieres at 8:30 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8), is prime time’s first comedy about a white family with a son and adopted daughter who adopt a wisecracking 14-year-old Asian boy and then are trapped into adopting his cuddly 6-year-old sister who’s black and not really his sister.

Listen, these things happen.

Elliott Gould and Dee Wallace Stone (the Dee Wallace of “E.T”) are David and Lori Randall. The Randalls’ decision to adopt Sam (Ke Huy Quan) without really consulting their present kids, Jack and Amy (Scott Grimes and Katie O’Neill), may strike you as a bit thoughtless, premature and even cruel, but this is only a half-hour show and there’s no time for dallying.

Playing on the Randalls’ sympathies, Sam then talks them into adopting his “sister” Sally (Natasha Bobo), who’s really not his sister. But the Randalls don’t know that until Sally shows up at their front door.

She’s so adorable, though, what’s a family to do? Adopt her, too, of course, almost as casually as buying a suit with an extra pair of pants.

“Together We Stand” starts running at its regular 8 p.m. Wednesday time Oct. 1. It’s a sitcom version of the United Nations, just not nearly as funny. There are some nice exchanges betwen the resentful present adoptee Amy and the elated incoming adoptee Sam, and Quan (from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”) proves himself a snappy little comedic actor.

Otherwise, this is merely another flip, manipulative, limp-lined sitcom about white adults taking in non-white kids that Wednesday nights can probably do without. Maybe if the Randalls also adopted ALF. . . .