Trios New but Not Improved

All these new midseason series about ditsy threesomes in their 20s--yech!

Now look, despite having zoomed past 50 some time ago on a fast track toward the next big geriatric milestone, I’m no bigot. I’ve known people in their 20s. Some of my best friends are in their 20s. My daughter is in her 20s. I had pizza Saturday with my nephew and three of his friends, all in their 20s. I believe in equal opportunity--yes, even affirmative action--for people in their 20s.

Yet is it too much to ask for just one prime-time series about people having problems with, you know, “irregularity”?

Just kidding. Barely.

Tonight, for example, brings the new ABC sitcom “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” and the Fox drama “Significant Others.” A bad memory from Monday is the new NBC sitcom, “House Rules,” and from Tuesday, ABC’s “That’s Life,” the only threesome in this boggling foursome whose characters are not in their 20s. Chronologically, they’re 30ish, but an infantile 30ish.

Advertisers have become ever savvy through the years in targeting specific segments of the population through television. This narrowcasting follows the hypothesis that viewers are most attracted to characters from their age group, in this case young presumably watching young, regardless of the level of creativity and execution.

Show 25-year-olds a series about muddled, self-absorbed, mopey, unsympathetic 25-year-olds (“Significant Others”) and they will watch, so goes the common wisdom. Give them a half-hour about three pepperonis in their early 20s (“Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place”), and they’ll watch that, too.

Caring not a whit about creaky codgers past 40, Fox is shrewdly continuing to stake its growth largely on the young crowd--when not fixating on the World’s Scariest Programs--a strategy that’s paid off via “Party of Five,” “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Melrose Place” and, most recently, “Ally McBeal.”

Not that age is really the point here. Young characters can appeal to viewers of any age if they have something to say, evoke universal qualities about youth or mirror something about their generation and the environment in which they live. Or if they are at least interesting like Ally McBeal, at once seductive and maddening at age 27.

On Monday’s typically surreal and stylish “Ally McBeal” from David E. Kelley, for example, Calista Flockhart’s Ally kick-boxed her rival, Georgia (Courtney Thorne-Smith); Tracey Ullman played an earnest but quite loopy therapist who danced to her own upbeat theme song and responded to Ally’s sad tales by switching on an electronic laugh track; and Judge Whipper Cone (Dyan Cannon) broke up with Richard Fish (Greg Germann) after he admitted “fingering Janet Reno’s wattle.”

Oh, yeah! You had to be there to appreciate Cannon’s stoniness while accusing a Reno look-alike of sexual intent with Richard, and Reno responding by vowing to investigate Whipper’s awesome hair. The hour was inventive, fabulously, farcically funny and somehow just a little bit tender, the mark of a show getting better and better.

The dings in tonight’s two new series occupy the opposite end of the food chain, although “Significant Others” does make a stab, however futile, at being a serious coming-of-age tome with Allyesque comedic undertones. And sown from the creators of “Party of Five,” at least it’s watchable.

“Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” is somehow from “Mad About You” co-creator Danny Jacobson. More than just unfunny, it’s excruciatingly painful, with Ryan Reynolds and Richard Ruccolo playing Boston graduate students who relentlessly open their mouths, but never a book, which in the real world means goodbye school. As if, in the first two episodes, that pair of loxes, apartment mates Berg (Reynolds) and Pete (Ruccolo), and their upstairs platonic pal, the shrill and irritating Sharon (Traylor Howard), resemble any universe outside of Pluto.

The longest half-hour you’ll ever endure, tonight’s premiere introduces the pizzeria where Berg and Pete work incompetently, and also finds Pete trying to break up with his girlfriend, Melissa, because she laughs demonically during sex. On paper, it’s a “Seinfeld” moment, if there ever was one, as is Sharon’s discovery in Episode 2, a la Elaine, that the apparent Mr. Right she’s been dating has a fatal flaw. “I finally find a guy I like, and he over-commits!”

What’s wittily and charmingly vacuous in one comedy, though, is merely vacuous in another, and if this series were a pizza, you’d either send it back or use it as a Frisbee.

It shares with the drama “Significant Others” core characters driven by a self-involvement so narrow and immobilizing that it isolates them from the recognizable mainstream. To the extent in “Significant Others” tonight that Cam (Eion Bailey) is so gripped by his own misery that he balks at giving the perfunctory toast at the wedding of his brother, Ben (Michael Weatherly), whose bride, Jane (Elizabeth Mitchell) is Cam’s former girlfriend.

As “Significant Others” opens, Cam is in the throes of a hyperventilation over learning that his best friends--Henry (Scott Bairstow), a slovenly smut writer who yearns to be a serious writer, and Nell (Jennifer Garner), who can’t commit to anything because she just can’t--have been secretly having an affair. Cam whines, then Henry and Nell whine, creating an impression (accurate) that this show is about whining.

Cam is the sulkiest of this sensitive trio of intolerable neurotics, on a constant bender because he is directionless and his father (Richard Masur) is nagging him to join him in the ladies foundations trade, believing there is no biz like bra biz. “Brassieres are stable, brassieres are profitable,” he tells the resistant Cam, who is damned depressed about it.

When Cam, Nell and Henry are not brooding, they’re berating one another, with Nell mad at Henry for selling out instead of writing seriously, and Henry ticked at Nell for quitting yet another job after promising to support him if he’d write seriously. There’s even more intense angst between Nell and Cam. “When are you gonna get over yourself?” Nell whines to Cam. “You can’t commit to a pet, to a lease or a channel on TV,” Cam whines to Nell.

Meanwhile, instead of merely creating smut, Henry is on the verge of living it with a 36-year-old married woman. And somewhere in all of this emotional bedlam, Cam has an epiphany. Boing! Speaking of commitment, he will commit his own life to coming up with “the next big thing.” No, not a square Hula-Hoop or pet pebble, but a video of farm animals for kids (“Sammy the sheep says, ‘Will you be my friend?’ ”). When he can’t get financing, he whines. When, in Episode 2, he does get financing, he whines.

In other words, the only uplifting character in this series is the brassiere guy.

* “Significant Others” premieres at 9 tonight on Fox (Channel 11). The network has rated it TV-14-DLS (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and sexual situations).

* “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” premieres at 9:30 tonight on ABC (Channel 7). The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language).