Weekend TV : Too Many Buchanans Spoil Sitcom Broth

“The Five Mrs. Buchanans” may be one Mrs. Buchanan too many.

Set in an Indianapolis suburb, the new CBS comedy series is an unlikely gathering of wives: four of them married to Buchanan brothers, the fifth their miserable, meddling wretch of a mother-in-law.

The young Mr. Buchanans are invisible on the premiere, and one appears briefly in Episode 2. Their main role is as joke fodder for the young Mrs. Buchanans: Alex (Judith Ivey), an earthy, wisecracking former New Yorker; Delilah (Beth Broderick), a loopy ex-waitress who favors skimpy body dresses; snooty, snotty, snide Vivian (Harriet Sansom Harris), and naive newlywed Bree (Charlotte Ross), a former Disneyland worker who shows off by doing the splits.

Although Alex and Delilah run a thrift store together, the sisters-in-law seem to have little in common beyond their acute dislike of Mother Buchanan (Eileen Heckart).

And what’s not to dislike? She’s insulting, overcritical, manipulative, nagging, selfish and generally loathsome--so gratingly unpleasant, in fact, that spending even part of a half-hour with her gets to be a drag. When she surfaces on the premiere, it’s an iceberg ripping into the hull. The show immediately sinks, as does the second episode when she comes around to cause trouble for Bree and her wimpy husband.

Mother Buchanan would be tolerable if the writers could at least turn her endless droning into humor. They don’t. Or if Heckart were in some way able to rise above the gimmickry of her cartoonish character. She isn’t.

Not that most of the other Mrs. Buchanans are any bargain either. Three are vastly overdrawn. Only the appealing Ivey’s Alex stands apart from this ghetto of caricatures, furnishing the first two shows with their only glints of wit and intelligence.

* “The Five Mrs. Buchanans” premieres at 9 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).