TV REVIEW : Fox’s ‘Roc’ a Bit Better Than Usual Garbage

Here’s hoping it’s no omen that the 1990-91 fall season is starting--in summer--with a comedy whose hero believes, “Everything in creation is destined to become garbage. . . .”

The character is burly, sensible, tight-waddish, ever-exasperated Roc Emerson (Charles Dutton), whose employment as a Baltimore garbage collector enables him to fill his house with used furniture and other discards from his route.

The series is “Roc,” a fairly promising sitcom from Fox premiering before the Emmy Awards Sunday at 7:30 p.m. (on KTTV Channel 11 and XETV Channel 6). Its regular time slot will be Sundays at 8:30 p.m., between two of the network’s most popular half-hours, “In Living Color” and “Married . . . With Children.”

Dependable, earnest, hard-working Roc is coexisting at home--with annoyance. The primary culprit is his slick, fast-talking, insincere younger brother, Joey (Rocky Carroll), who Sunday joins an Emerson household already reverberating from the white-bashing polemics of Roc’s father, Andrew (Carl Gordon), and the sassy sexiness of his night-shift-working wife, Eleanor (Ella Joyce). Dutton, Carroll and Gordon also appeared together on Broadway in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.”

If only Roc collected as many laughs as he does garbage. Although this hybrid series (supplied to Fox by HBO Independent Productions) was originated by the richly pedigreed Stan Daniels (who co-created “Taxi” and was one of the producers of “The Mary Tyler Show”), the setup is rather routine sitcom fare. Yet the characters are interesting enough, the cast skilled enough and the comedy just barely funny enough to merit future monitoring of this noisy family saving for a brighter future.

Roc: “In a few more years, I’ll have enough money to put a down payment on the kind of home I’ve always wanted: semi-detached.” Cross your fingers that Sunday’s premiere is Fox’s down payment on something better, too.