Religion on the Menu in Lear’s ‘Sunday Dinner’ : Television: New sitcom from the creator of ‘All in the Family’ doesn’t have a prayer against a landmark Archie Bunker rerun.

It’s Sunday. Ben Benedict, a 56-year-old widower, has brought his 30-year-old fiancee, TT, home to meet his three grown children, sister and granddaughter.

Only they don’t know she’s his fiancee. And he doesn’t know that she’s such a devout Christian that she regularly prays in private, addressing God as “Her” or “Him” or, on this day, “Chief.”

“Chief, you gotta minute?” she begins, praying that Ben’s family will like her. “He doesn’t know that I talk to you, and he’s not ready to hear it, either.”

The bigger question is whether America is ready to hear religion from Norman Lear, whose new CBS comedy “Sunday Dinner” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8, marking his return to television after a seven-year absence.

The Rev. Donald Wildmon isn’t ready. Wildmon is the influential religious conservative who has used his American Family Assn. to crusade aggressively against what he defines as “anti-Christian” TV programming and other allegedly unwholesome areas of the arts.

Disagreeing with other clerical reviewers, Wildmon has already publicly lambasted “Sunday Dinner”--typically, without seeing it.

There are two items to ponder on the “Sunday Dinner” menu: Besides the religious entree, there’s the comedy. Just as the primary purpose of Lear’s signature, ground-breaking work, “All in the Family,” was humor, not social comment, so is the primary aim of “Sunday Dinner” to spoon out laughter, not to debate religion.

On Sunday, it does little of either.

One by one, the characters arrive for the family’s weekly dinner. In addition to growly Ben (Robert Loggia) and guileless TT (Teri Hatcher), there are Ben’s militantly atheist older daughter, Vicky (Martha Gehman); his faddish daughter, Diana (Kari Lizer), and his shysterish son, Kenneth (Patrick Breen). Plus we get Ben’s granddaughter, Rachel (Shiri Appleby), and sister, Martha (Marian Mercer), herself a deeply religious woman whose attempts to say grace at the dinner table are drowned out by the family’s jabbering.

Ben’s daughters react badly to his engagement to someone they regard as a “bimbo,” and when TT uses such terms as “cosmic piety” to describe her beliefs, she’s regarded as some sort of UFO.

The comedy is played broadly, with Lear’s intended boffo ending badly telegraphed. A more fundamental problem, though, is that from start to finish, his script is simply not very funny.

Especially when measuring new Lear against old Lear.

As it happens, “Sunday Dinner” has one of the CBS time slots once occupied by Lear’s cosmic comedy “All in the Family” and, in fact, is being followed during its six-week run by episodes of the older series, starting with the hilarious 1971 pilot, which found Archie and Edith Bunker (Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton) arriving home after church and interrupting Mike and Gloria (Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers), who are upstairs in a sexual situation.

Ironically, it was this little bit of benign sexual business--not the ugly racial epithets uttered by the red-neck Archie--that panicked CBS into almost replacing the “Meet the Bunkers” episode with a milder one when the bigotry-slamming series premiered more than 20 years ago.

The pairing of these two Lear series from different generations benefits viewers, reminding us just how funny, well-written and artfully acted “All in the Family” was, and also that today’s TV mostly muffles such brainy, visionary comedy just as surely as Archie always sought to muffle Edith.

The linkage hardly benefits “Sunday Dinner,” though. Despite the presence of Loggia and that grand farceur Mercer, it seems almost anorexic beside “All in the Family,” much of which is as funny today as yesterday, if less outrageous. In fact, one can envision “All in the Family” reruns finding an entirely new large audience in prime time.

If the comedy of “Sunday Dinner” is only hazily defined in the premiere, so, too, is its religious message.

Long a target of the religious right, producer-writer Lear was quoted in Newsweek recently as saying that the subtext of “Sunday Dinner” will be the “hunger in America resulting from our neglect of the spirit.”

One can’t blame Wildmon for being skeptical, however. A recent rerun of Lear’s old series “The Jeffersons,” for example, was brutal and mean-spirited in its ridiculing of a “born-again” preacher.

So, too, is there merit in the “anti-Christian” charge that Wildmon makes against all of TV.

There are some exceptions, one of the most recent being an episode of Gary Goldberg’s since-canceled “American Dreamer” series on NBC in which the protagonist, played by Robert Urich, was inspired by a female Episcopal priest to consider returning to his own religion. ABC’s “thirtysomething” also did several episodes exploring the religious roots of some of its characters.

In the main, however, prime time has done to religion what dogs do to fire plugs, pouring on the ridicule, its prejudice nourished in recent times by the debacles of fallen preachers Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.

“Writers bring their religious baggage along with their other baggage,” observed Elizabeth Thoman, a nun who heads the Center for Media and Values in Los Angeles. “A lot of what we’re seeing on TV is pent-up frustration from people who have not worked out their own spiritual journey.

“ ‘All in the Family’ dealt with racism and family relations,” Thoman added. “What we have never dealt with (on TV) are spiritual issues, because those are the hardest to talk about. When we do, we connect on a very deep level.”

Perhaps “Sunday Dinner” will do that. And while one can’t blame Wildmon for raising an eyebrow, just as Archie Bunker used to get that silly expression on his face when he was suspicious, he can be blamed for attacking “Sunday Dinner” and Lear’s “new theology” sight unseen.

Based on the “Sunday Dinner” premiere, it appears that religious skeptics are the narrow-minded Archies in Lear’s new realm, with TT representing a greater truth. Maybe.

In any event, one of Archie’s pet expressions applies to the Wildmons of the world who loudly protest what they haven’t even seen.

Stifle yourself.