This Comedy Leaves Little to Imagination

NBC’s midseason comedy “Imagine That” opens tonight as a testosterone-lite “Mind of the Married Man,” the HBO series driven by lust and lusty fantasies.

Although “Imagine That” isn’t graphic, its tone is strongly orgasmic. The premiere is totally about sex, as sketch comedy writer Josh Miller (Hank Azaria) and his wife, Wendy (Jayne Brook), visit a therapist twice to work out their problems in bed. He wants sex when he wants it; she doesn’t want it much at all. Meanwhile, all eyes are on the breasts and thong underwear of the beautiful new assistant hired by Josh’s skirt-chasing partner, Kenny (Joshua Malina), for no apparent reason other than her impressive bodily attributes.

She came in and “blew me away,” Kenny says. Josh: “I’m so glad you said ‘away.’”

That’s a sample of the humor in this series, whose adult material is a terrible match for its 8 p.m. time period. With Azaria as an executive producer as well as star, “Imagine That” has a nice cast but delivers sporadically. Only rarely is the premiere funny, its best moments yielded by Barb (Katey Sagal), the spacey head writer on the TV series for which Josh and Kenny work. It’s ironic that writing should be problematic in the debut of a series whose setting is a TV comedy.

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“Imagine That” premieres tonight at 8 on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).