Deadpan dads

You could draw a line from “The Cosby Show” to the new CBS sitcom “Listen Up,” or ABC’s upcoming “Rodney,” except at some point the line would fray and, finally, break apart from abuse.

Whither the situation comedy father? Here’s whither: He is being recycled, network season after network season, as a hapless, benign man-child, tolerated (if he hasn’t been abandoned) by the wife and the butt of one-liners from child actors who tell jokes as if they’ve spent July and August at some kind of Friars Club summer camp.

Howard Cunningham of “Happy Days,” now there was a sitcom dad -- absentee, with a real job, the father you were a little afraid to approach as he sat slumped in his chair with a drink, staring at what had become of his life.

Mr. Cunningham was a man; he kept Fonzie in his place, , and I was already afraid of Fonzie. Given his other breadwinner duties, this made Mr. Cunningham practically a superhero, even though he was played by the sleepy-eyed Tom Bosley. He owned a hardware store. The sitcom dads of today don’t own much of anything, except a kind of childish entitlement. That was the 1950s, though. The family-owned hardware store is now a Wal-Mart, and the sitcom dad has lost his gravitas. He’s there to be dumped on, it seems.

Three dad-centered shows debuting this week prove this, more or less: “Listen Up” on CBS, starring Jason Alexander, and two ABC comedies -- “Rodney,” starring Rodney Carrington, and “Complete Savages,” with Keith Carradine. (Another, CBS’ “Center of the Universe,” starring John Goodman, debuts in two weeks.)

A father figure

Each of these shows owes a debt to “The Cosby Show,” which debuted 20 Septembers ago, and, perhaps to a greater extent, “Home Improvement,” which came on the air in 1991.

Both sitcoms were huge moneymakers that employed the same formula: Stand-up comedian grafts his act onto domestic household situation. Bill Cosby’s character was more purely an extension of this equation. He still tours the country dispensing his world-weary, patriarchal wit and wisdom -- and sometimes getting into trouble for it in ways that he didn’t as the father on “The Cosby Show.” Witness the media storm Cosby touched off earlier this year when, at an event in Washington commemorating the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, he reportedly told his audience that “the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids -- $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’ ”

There’s comedy and tragedy in that comment, and a touch of Archie Bunker. Might Cosby come back to sitcoms as a bling-bling-hating, black neo-conservative dad parked in his favorite chair? Doubtful. The networks, playing it far safer with their comedies this fall than they are with their dramas, want the latest version of Tim Allen more than Cosby.

Allen, a comic from the Midwest, built a following in the 1980s defending the piggish male when “political correctness” threatened to roll back rituals such as car-engine-canoodling and the right to burp in public (since proven to be a false alarm). On TV, he was bungling fix-it guy Tim Taylor, whose authority at home was malleable but never so teetering that it threatened to undo the family unit. “Home Improvement” was a nice show, and Tim was a nice, goofball dad -- younger than Archie Bunker or Cosby and with much less on his mind -- certainly less than that other great TV father of the ‘90s, Homer Simpson. “Home Improvement” bled the color out of the patriarch, made hundreds of millions of dollars for Disney, and thus ushered in the safe, blue-collar family sitcom everyone’s still chasing.

It was a fine show for its day, but here’s the legacy: Today, every sitcom father, no matter his race, appears to be the same white man standing in the same living room in the same plaid shirt (sometimes tucked in, sometimes not -- and sometimes not even plaid; there appears to be some wiggle room on this last issue).

Comics Damon Wayans and George Lopez and “SNL” alumnus Jim Belushi give ABC a kind of rainbow coalition of dads, but you sense that they’re all a version of the same guy: bemused by parental responsibility, a little bit angry at what’s been sacrificed at the altar of domesticity. Add the Friars Club camp children and a terribly attractive wife. Stir and let cool. Serve to the heartland.

Add “Rodney” to the menu. ABC’s airing it at 9:30 Tuesday nights, after Wayans in “My Wife and Kids,” Lopez in “George Lopez” and Belushi in “According to Jim.”

The heartland shall not be confused. In fact, I think it will be possible to fall asleep during “According to Jim,” wake up during “Rodney” and not be disoriented in the least.

“Rodney” is Rodney Carrington, a stand-up comic-musician (usually a reason to run out of the room) who apparently worked his tail off on the circuit and earned the admiration of fans of good-ol’-boy humor. This occurred in the Red States, those parts of the country Hollywood loves to patronize. When first we see him on “Rodney,” he’s standing in the kitchen scrambling eggs, singing “Eatin’ baby chickens who never had a chance.” We’re in Oklahoma, the kind of Oklahoma they make in Burbank. Soon the well-groomed blond wife and Friars Club camp kids enter. We learn that Rodney has quit his dead-end job at the fiberglass plant and wants to follow through on his dream of becoming a stand-up comedian.

The rest of the pilot unfolds, with accents. Hicks gather, so the humor has to be about what hicks do. Carrington’s likable enough -- this show is probably a kind of dream come true, and I’m sure Disney has market research that shows how much America likes him. And what America says it likes, America gets.

The network’s other new comedy is “Complete Savages,” about a father, played by Keith Carradine, raising his five sons, who are all slobs. The mother has gone away because, I gleaned, she was crazy. Now the house is such a mess, and the boys such hellcats, they can’t keep a housekeeper. In the pilot Carradine must force them to pick up after themselves. He’s a fireman, which also helps bring some much-needed manliness back to the sitcom dad role. In fact, he sounds uncannily like Mike Brady, which makes it strange when he says to one of his kids: “Your iguana’s in my toilet again, and I found out the hard way.” As the scene played out, I was still stuck on this joke. Did the iguana bite him somewhere, or what? Please explain, “Complete Savages.”

I should say here that “Complete Savages,” which airs at 8:30 during ABC’s Friday night comedy block, is from Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions. Gibson directed the pilot. If his creative instincts about Jesus Christ are any gauge, he’s found a hit in a series that takes boyish toilet humor to its logical extremes. He’s a well-known “Three Stooges” fan, Gibson is, and this sitcom is the Stooges meets “Married ... With Children” meets ... that iguana joke. I can’t get over it.

Loud and louder

There are no jokes to get past in “Listen Up”; there is only George yelling. George is George Costanza, the character Alexander played on “Seinfeld,” and the ghost he is trying to elude in this, his second post-”Seinfeld” show.

He plays Tony Kleinman, a character based on the veteran Washington Post sportswriter Tony Kornheiser, who can be seen doing his kvetching columnist routine on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” which he co-hosts with sportswriter colleague Michael Wilbon. On ESPN, both yell, so I guess Alexander feels he is being true not only to the character but to the entire genre of yelling about sports.

That’s OK, but then it’s yelling overload, for he’s also battling his willful daughter Megan (Daniella Monet). So this is Dad as impish, maddeningly unaware person, out of control at his kid’s soccer game. “My very existence is a humiliation to her,” Kleinman says to his wife. Alexander is a good example of what’s going on with the put-upon sitcom dad nowadays: He’s dumped on mercilessly, set up as a kind of victim, but meanwhile he’s the reason we’re all gathered here.

“Listen Up” will make a go of it Monday nights at 8:30. As at ABC, the time slot is surrounded by other dad shows -- “Still Standing,” “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Two and a Half Men.”

Meanwhile, the only sitcom dad nominated for tonight’s Emmys is the late John Ritter, of ABC’s “Eight Simple Rules.”

If there’s so little meat in the role, why does the character continue to dominate schedules? And why a corresponding lack of sitcom moms at the center of their own shows?

I doubt it’s that the networks feel fatherhood is a rich and desperately important cultural topic right now. It’s conceivable that there’s a huge number of viewers turning on the TV every night looking for a jokey dad, but I wouldn’t follow the scripts. I’d follow the money -- all those potential sitcom dads saying “let’s make a deal.”