TV Review : ‘Muddling Through’ Drives Into Too Many Potholes

“Muddling Through” is about a trashy woman who returns to her rural cafe/motel/service station after a three-year jail stint for shooting up her philandering husband.

Bring on the low jinks. The CBS comedy, which didn’t make the fall schedule, sputters through tonight’s premiere mostly on empty, its crush of bogglingly bad jokes all but eclipsing its occasional darts of stinging dark wit and Stephanie Hodge’s energy and good comic timing as twangy parolee Connie Drego.

Returning to Drego’s Oasis, Connie discovers that her 18-year-old daughter, Madeline (Jennifer Aniston), has married Trooper Cooper (Scott Waara), the idiot cop whose testimony sent her to prison, and that her 16-year-old daughter, Kerri (Aimee Brooks), is living wildly and dressing like a hooker.

Caustic Connie to Kerri: “I did not bust out, why is yours?” Obviously, “Muddling Through” is not the mother’s milk of creativity. And the hicksville humor intensifies when Connie finds that two-timing Sonny Drego (D. David Morin), the “dirt with a driver’s license” whose buttocks she almost shot off three years ago, is living on the premises.

Obviously, this family is dysfunctional. And, despite the ear-splitting din of studio audience laughter that greets every one-liner, so is the comedy.

* “Muddling Through” airs at 9 tonight on CBS Channel 2.