TV REVIEWS : Even the Jokes Are Old in ABC’s ‘Dinosaurs’

Oh no. Not another sitcom about a flesh-eating Megalosaurus with a heart of gold.

Well, not entirely. Earl’s wife, Fran, is an Allosaurus, and his best friend and co-worker, Roy, is a Tyrannosaurus, and their fangy boss, B.P. Richfield, is a Triceratops.

Thus, “Dinosaurs,” the new ABC comedy with 60-million-year-old jokes. It premieres at 8:30 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, an endearingly bizarre little half-hour that is never quite as funny as it should be, but funny and different enough to invite tuning in again.

In the first major outing from Jim Henson’s company since his death, you might say “Dinosaurs” has an ensemble cast. Using puppetry and new and improved audio animatronics, it’s a series (from Michael Jacobs Productions and Jim Henson Productions in association with Walt Disney Television) in which people wear dinosaur suits, other people move body parts and still others provide voices.

Sherman Hemsley, Sam McMurray, Stuart Pankin, Florence Stanley and Sally Struthers are the voices, but the producers are being coy about who is speaking for which dinosaur.

The main protagonists are the Sinclairs, your basic blue-collar dinosaurs, whose daily lives are a comment on modern times, when many humans take the Earth for granted. For example, Earl is a tree pusher for a giant developer, knocking down forests to accommodate tract homes.

The characters and settings are wildly creative, but some of the voices are grating, and the humor on most of the premiere is not very sharp or tenacious for a series that aims to satirize in addition to creating arresting visual images. An exception is a scene in which Earl arrives home (the cave) to find Fran beside a giant dinosaur egg. He’s aghast: “How in the hell could this have happened?” Later, Fran coos baby talk to her egg, from which an infant soon emerges and begins chattering.

This bit at least is very, very funny, giving hope that “Dinosaurs” will hatch more good things next week.

ABC unveiled another venture with possibilities this week: “My Life and Times,” a rare half-hour series whose core agenda is plot, not comedy. Unfortunately, few of the possibilities were realized in its premiere at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, and the next two episodes don’t do any better.

Instead, the show reeks of righteousness, heavy sentiment and predictable endings.

The year is 2035, and Tom Irwin plays 85-year-old Ben Miller, a widowed former writer now residing in a retirement retreat where he unloads on everyone who will listen, bending ears with vignettes from his past. Wednesday it was his grandson who got the treatment, as Ben relived a day in 1989 when he and his advertising agency boss were clobbered by the San Francisco earthquake as his wife, Rebecca (Helen Hunt), was in a hospital giving birth to their first child.

The episode was nicely staged, but Michael (“Class Action”) Apted’s direction was somewhat static, and the story’s death/birth trade-off was never effectively exploited in executive producer Ron Koslow’s script. There was one particularly glaring omission, moreover, when Ben finally made it to the hospital and Rebecca never even wondered how he fared in the quake.

Next week’s episode is mostly a disaster, with Ben encountering a failing, elderly woman with whom he once had a fling. She appears gone mentally until that talking head Ben predictably jolts her from her stupor with words galore. That he would immediately recognize a woman he saw briefly only three times more than half a century ago (“It’s me, Ben, remember?”) is far-fetched, to say the least.

The third episode makes a stab at wit, teasing us with some potentially humorous setups as Ben recalls the tumult leading to his marriage, only to fall short.

Buried beneath a thick mask of makeup as gabby, raspy, older Ben, Irwin is no Armin Mueller-Stahl spinning charming nostalgia and rich verbal history a la “Avalon.” Nor is the square younger Ben--who just has to be the Rotary Club of TV characters--much more than a dud.

At once a series that’s futuristic and roams the past, “My Life and Times” is an interesting idea, yet one whose initial thickness even an earthquake can’t shake up.