TV Reviews : The New Season : ‘Good Grief’: A Not-So-Wise Undertaking

The new Fox comedy series “Good Grief” is as funny as a funeral.

Premiering at 9:30 p.m. Sunday on Channels 11 and 6, it’s about funerals, in fact, starring Howie Mandel as sleazy Ernie Lapidus, whose attempts to impose his used-car-salesman mentality on Sincerity Mortuary outrages his brother-in-law (Joel Brooks), who ran the dignified family business on his own until Ernie married his sister (Wendy Schaal).

The opening story finds Ernie hawking the mortuary in TV commercials and scheming to confiscate a fancy sports car that a client was buried in and replace it with a Pinto.

This half-hour is a Pinto--all chromed up with a gyrating hula girl in the rear window and a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.

In the second episode--which introduces Ernie’s con-artist friend Ringo (Tom Poston)--Ernie announces that he will honor a transvestite’s request to be buried in a dress, shocking the dead man’s family. The concluding eulogy is grating witlessness. They should have buried this script.

Put “Good Grief” in the category of good ideas left in the oven too long. Instead of approaching Evelyn Waugh’s grossly funny satire of the burial business in “The Loved One” and its ensuing movie version, “Good Grief” gives you only the gross. Instead of black humor, you get only the black--endless overbaked gags accompanied by laughter that sounds as if it was run through an echo chamber. Better a cremation chamber.