In-Laws Bring Laughs on ‘Yes, Dear’

For anyone still fretting over a gift for Mother’s Day, CBS has come to the rescue, and six days early to boot. Just sit the dear old gal in front of the tube tonight at 8:30 and let the domestic sitcom “Yes, Dear” deliver a gift-wrapped episode showing just how indispensable a mother can be.

And how irritating, overbearing and controlling, too--but that’s only to make the Mother Knows Best payoff work all the better.

Vicki Lawrence and Tim Conway of the suddenly hot-again “Carol Burnett Show” reprise their roles as Natalie and Tom Warner, who decide to spend a few days visiting son Greg (Anthony Clark) and his wife, Kim (Jean Louisa Kelly).

As in-laws, Kim and Natalie have the oil-and-water chemistry that seems a staple of sitcoms today, but tonight it’s Greg who begins to chafe under his mother’s relentless ordering-around of his father.

Believing that if he can just get his father away from his mother for a couple of days he can reinstill some independent thinking in the man, Greg virtually kidnaps him for a male-bonding getaway to Las Vegas, with neighbor Jimmy (Mike O’Malley) tagging along. But from the moment the three walk into their hotel, it’s one small disaster after another, with the “comedy” built on just how far doddering Dad has slipped into ditherhood. Like a lot of TV, it’s amusing if you don’t think about it too hard.

Conway is a master at shuffling befuddlement, and his skills, along with Lawrence’s true-confession moments back home (“I kissed Ringo Starr!”), make this episode a cut above the norm for “Yes, Dear.”

And as long as the second-season show holds on to its mother lode of a time slot (between “The King of Queens” and “Everybody Loves Raymond”), that will suffice.