TV REVIEW : ‘Marshall Chronicles’ Delivers Laughs, Characters

“The Marshall Chronicles” is not only smart and funny, but also feels like no other comedy in prime time.

The ABC series premieres at 9:30 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, giving America a New York-style sitcom that’s Big Apple to the core and introducing, in teen-ager Marshall Brightman, a fresh, endearingly offbeat hero whose adventures you look forward to following week after week.

Joshua Rifkind is a curly haired, bespectacled whiz as Marshall, a smart kid from a well-to-do family in Manhattan. The setting and humor are strictly urban. There’s a subway where the bizarre is routine. There are street people. And there’s a high school where leather-jacketed hoods roam the halls and torment the Marshall Brightmans of the world as well as their teachers (Teacher: “Put the desk down, please!”).

All the while Marshall speaks to the camera (“Man must struggle to understand a world that is barely knowable”) and to his fellow students: Johnny (Gabriel Bologna), Melissa (Nile Lanning) and Leslie (Meredith Scott Lynn). Their multi-tiered relationship works this way: Leslie is stuck on Marshall who is stuck on Melissa who is stuck on Johnny, a sort of benevolent hood not unlike The Fonz of “Happy Days.”

Written by creator/executive producer Richard Rosenstock and directed by James Burrows, the premiere finds Marshall seemingly being pursued by Melissa, only to discover that not all is as it seems. It’s a crisp, witty show.

The second episode, in which a quiz cheating scheme goes awry, is less successful. But Episode 3, featuring a Jewish wedding (this one was written by Ken Levine and David Isaacs), not only pushes the right ethnic buttons but also is howlingly funny and gives Rifkind and Lynn some wonderful funny/tender moments together as guilt-ridden Marshall and the neurotic Leslie.

Whether a series with reference points from Jonestown to Phillip Roth plays in Peoria remains to be seen. But it sure plays in this house.