Pauly minds mom’s store

“Minding the Store” (premiering Sunday on TBS with back-to-back episodes) is a reality series -- though its claim on the word “reality” is even more tenuous than usual -- in which the comedian Pauly Shore tries to revive the fortunes of West Hollywood’s Comedy Store, owned by his mother, Mitzi (a voice on the telephone). That Shore is running the club for his mother is true enough, as are other details of his life; but like the upcoming “Tommy Lee Goes to College,” “Minding the Store” is built to echo a certain kind of old-fashioned, fish-out-of-water, doofus-in-over-his-head B-picture comedy. (The titular similarity to Jerry Lewis’ 1963 “Who’s Minding the Store?” is possibly not coincidental.)

Video cameras, improvised dialogue and documentary pretensions notwithstanding, this is a Pauly Shore movie in which Pauly Shore plays a character named Pauly Shore who has been given the run of a comedy club. In Sunday’s opener, plagued by barely attended off-nights at the club, Shore comes up with an idea: “Hot Girls of the Comedy Store,” which is to say, comedians a guy like Pauly would want to see naked. The audition scenes are clearly meant to be cruelly funny but are merely cruel.

Shore had five or six very good years back in the 1990s, when, with his corkscrew hair and Ringling Bros. wardrobe, he was a fixture on MTV and had a three-picture deal with Disney and record albums and his own HBO special; he was a Cheech and/or Chong for his generation. But steam had run out of that engine by the time of his extraordinarily short-lived 1997 Fox sitcom, “Pauly.”

That failure, and his subsequent lack of Hollywood bankability, has become, strangely, the hook on which he now hangs his career, turning a morsel of desperation into endlessly self-referential shtick. “I used to be on top of the world,” he says over the opening credits, “but now, not so much.”

Still, it’s hard to feel sympathy for his plight, as he seems not really to have one (beyond his avowed sex addiction, which comes up in Episode 2, and the fact that his mother won’t let him have his way with her nightclub). He lives in a nice house, drives a nice car, and seems able to find work -- just not in the movies. “He is always in the public eye with his many sold-out comedy shows throughout the country,” one reads on his website. His curse is that he’s not as big as Adam Sandler.

Apart from getting his face back on television, “Minding the Store” does Shore no real service. You can’t tell -- not from the first two episodes, at any rate -- whether he’s smart or stupid, generous or self-involved, or what he knows or likes beyond fame and sex. (He’s trying to get more of the first and refrain from the second.) Never much of an actor to begin with, he seems stiff here just being himself. You certainly don’t get the impression that he’s funny, though to be fair, he’s largely a straight man in this series. Shore doesn’t come off as a bad guy, but he doesn’t come off as any other kind of guy, particularly, neither likable nor unlikable.

As much goes for the people around him, his associates and the people who might be his friends. Some are cast as stock characters -- like his nemesis, Tommy the club booker, whose “only talent is squashing my buzz,” says Pauly, or Pauly’s thickly accented Mexican “sidekick,” Marlon -- without getting enough screen time to convey any character at all. Apart from the occasional impulsive reaction or fugitive exchange, nearly the whole thing gives the impression -- perhaps a false impression, but a strong one -- of having been staged. Even Pauly’s scenes with his sex therapist have an air of prearrangement.

It is different, however, when he interacts with his divorced parents, Comedy Store owner Mitzi (she may be just a voice on the telephone, but she’s one that suggests a character worth getting a look at) and aged stand-up Sammy Shore, with whom, in Episode 2, Pauly splits a club date in Austin, Texas. Some of their business together is obviously planned, or at least tuned for effect -- there is a lot of nonsense with busty blonds -- but there are little flashes of connection between father and son that are more interesting and complicated than anything else on this otherwise unconvincing series.

*

‘Minding the Store’

Where: TBS

When: 10 p.m. Sunday

Ratings: TV-14-DL (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for coarse language and suggestive dialogue)

Pauly Shore...Self

Marlon Hernandez...Handyman

Tommy Morris...Talent booker

Executive producer Rob Lee