‘FRESNO’: THE LAUGHS SHRIVEL

I know what you’re thinking. Just another raisin story.

“Fresno” may be TV’s first intentionally hokey miniseries, though, a six-hour saga of money, power, murder and dehydration performed by such supreme farceurs as Carol Burnett, Dabney Coleman and Charles Grodin.

It premieres 9-11 p.m. Sunday on CBS (Channels 2 and 8), followed by 8 p.m. hourlong segments Monday through Thursday.

In “Fresno,” Michael Petryni, Mark Ganzel and executive producer Barry Kemp have also written TV’s first purposely tacky story about Central California’s raisin rat race, as scheming Charlotte Kensington (Burnett) and her oily son Cane Kensington (Grodin) battle despicable Tyler Cane (Coleman) for supremacy. Tyler will do anything to gain raisin supremacy. Do you hear? ANYTHING!!!!

Charlotte Kensington (downhearted): “He has no principles, no morals. He’s a ruthless, conniving shell of a human being. We’re just not like that.”

Cane Kensington (comforting her): “Yes we are, Mama.”

Everyone knows about the raisin industry’s glamour. Here, at last, is the dark underside. Although they live in a Southfork-size mansion and out-booze even the Ewings, the Kensingtons are so downtrodden that their Rolls is on the fritz and they’re chauffeured around in the back of a battered station wagon while being ridiculed by Tyler.

Meanwhile, Charlotte’s idealistic younger son Kevin (Anthony Heald) is labeled “environmentally insane” and her adopted daughter Tiffany (Valerie Mahaffey) searches for her real mother helped by Torch, the shirtless stranger (Gregory Harrison), who may be the illegitimate half brother-in-law of Cane’s lusty second wife Talon (Teri Garr).

In fact, just about everyone in “Fresno”--with the possible exceptions of the thudding Billy Joe Bobb (Bill Paxton) and Bobbi Jo Bobb (Teresa Ganzel)--are either illegitimate or rotten or both.

The mystery is why, given this premise and cast, “Fresno” isn’t funnier.

No one plays comic scum better than Coleman or arches a brow better than Burnett or wears rubber hair better than Grodin. “Fres

no” at times is their text on parody. And there are some simply hilarious surges in “Fresno,” usually drawn from casually delivered throwaway lines that take about a half-second to sink in.

But these are separated by long, meandering, labored, arid stretches that leaden your lids. Bring a book to read.

Perhaps the story’s gimmick--an extended cheap joke mocking a genre that seems almost to mock itself--is too difficult to sustain. Or perhaps the big, brawny, bright lights of the metropolis of Fresno are just too exciting to capture on a small screen.