TV Reviews : ‘Royal Family’ a Tired, Formulaic Comedy; a Too-Predictable ‘Teech’ Flunks Out

CBS aims to affirm tonight that you can go home again. Home, in this case, consists of prime-time comedy past.

The hour deja vu test begins at 8 (on Channels 2 and 8) with the premiere of “The Royal Family,” starring Redd Foxx and Della Reese as grandparents Al and Victoria Royal. With Al about to retire from his job as an Atlanta postman, the Royals have an orderly life. They’ll take a little trip, then return to their cozy house and live happily--if combatively--ever after. Then . . . the doorbell rings.

It’s their daughter, Elizabeth, and her three kids, stopping over for a visit. Elizabeth discloses that she is getting a divorce. And oh, yes, until it goes through, can she and her brood move in?

So long retirement, hello formulaic television.

The Royal household is immediately transformed into a chaotic battleground with poor Al not taking well to his new role as patriarch of an extended family.

“The Royal Family” has energy, but not much else. And if the theme isn’t familiar enough, there’s Foxx himself, who is more or less a middle-class reincarnation of the crass, cantankerous junkman who conned his way through “Sanford and Son” on NBC in the mid-1970s. Foxx still has the gift, and he and Reese are fine together. But he looks, walks and talks like Fred Sanford, except that the material isn’t nearly as funny.

To hear Al putting down his wife, in fact, he could just as easily be Fred belittling his sister, Esther: “I like a full-figure lady like you. That way if we lose the house, we could live in your bloomers.”

With jokes like those, and a few others, “The Royal Family” may lose its bloomers to the competition.

Part 2 of CBS’ time travel back into the ‘70s follows at 8:30, revisiting “Welcome Back, Kotter,” the ABC comedy that starred Gabe Kaplan as a high school teacher who successfully coped with the school’s worst characters.

Except that the setting for “Teech” is not a run-down school in Brooklyn but a snooty boys school in Philadelphia. And the wisecracking protagonist confronted by the school’s four most notorious snots is not an alumnus but South Philly music teacher Teech Gibson (Phill Lewis), a black man so out of sync with lily white Winthrop Academy that on his first day at work he is mistaken for an electrician by the headmaster’s secretary.

Thus, “Teech” teeters from the start, following prescribed patterns and relying on ethnic humor that was getting to be stale a decade ago. There’s no connection. You need a hall pass to get into this series.

Like Kotter, Gibson has a boss who despises him, and headmaster Litton (Steven Gilborn) immediately assigns his newest staff member to teach Winthrop’s most notorious foursome the school song.

Along the way, he almost gets one of them expelled, only to discover mitigating reasons for the boy’s refusal to cooperate. This new understanding leads to the inevitable Serious Moment. That’s the trouble with “Teech”: inevitability.