TV REVIEW : Inoffensive, Routine ‘Kirk’ Kicks Off the New Season

Opening a fall season with “Kirk” is like launching an armada with a rubber duck.

Bummer. Yet here comes “Kirk,” bobbing along at the head of the fleet, offering viewers a look at the first of 42 new series for the 1995-96 season and a preview of amiable Kirk Cameron in a WB Network comedy that ultimately will air at 8 p.m. Sundays.

Cameron got famous fast as the eldest Seaver sibling in ABC’s “Growing Pains.” But amiable, shmamiable. At its best, “Kirk,” which comes from the production team that begat “Family Matters” and “Step by Step,” is inoffensive and routine, a bland comedy whose slight jokes produce little to laugh about.

The premise--a 22-year-old bachelor is faced with rearing his 13-year-old sister (Taylor Fry) and two younger brothers (Will Estes and Courtland Mead) after the death of their parents--is all too familiar. In this case, Kirk Hartman (Cameron) is a recent college graduate from Ohio who has moved into a Greenwich Village pad across the hall from a swell-looking medical student (Chelsea Noble), only to have his aunt assign him permanent charge of his three siblings. So much for her family values.

Yet Kirk is tenuously optimistic. “How hard could it be?” he asks. “I’ve read stories where children were raised by wolves.”

Naturally, everything goes wrong, and a cabbage would cope better than Kirk. Especially when his grating 7-year-old brother throws a tantrum in a grocery store and gets stuck in a toilet. He’s so obnoxious you want to flush him.

The premiere also dwells a bit on Kirk’s best friend (Louis Vanaria) and his apartment super (Debra Mooney), who, presumably, are there to deliver a New Yorkuh sensibility. “Kirk” is about as New York as Peoria, however. And about as funny.

If it quacks like a duck . . .

* “Kirk” premieres at 8:30 tonight on KTLA-TV Channel 5.