‘Men of a Certain Age’ keeps its pace

The most shocking thing about the sweatiest recent sex scene on television wasn’t that it ended, um, prematurely, nor that it resulted, indirectly, in a black eye. It’s that it involved Ray Romano.

Hearing Romano -- his character, Joe Tranelli, actually -- narrate this encounter, from his first post-divorce date, has been one of the many uncomfortable pleasures of “Men of a Certain Age” (TNT, 10 p.m. Mondays), honest about disappointment in a way uncommon for television.

Unlike, say, “Cougar Town,” which tackles middle age with hysteria and a series of blunt-force punch lines, “Men of a Certain Age” has far more in common with “thirtysomething”: slow, even-keeled, interested in detail. Its characters may be resigned to the sagging that comes with age, but they’re not complacent.

The show, which was recently picked up for a second season, centers on three lifelong friends -- Terry Elliott (Scott Bakula), Owen Thoreau Jr. (Andre Braugher) and Romano’s Joe -- each stuck on a plateau. Terry is an underemployed actor, shrugging his way through temp jobs and waiting for a break that’s not coming. Joe owns a party-supply store, battles a gambling habit that contributed to his marriage crumbling, and struggles to communicate with his two teenage kids. On paper, Owen is the most stable of the three, but he works under the thumb of his imperious father.

Among the men, there’s the occasional antipathy that lurks in plenty of long-standing friendships. Terry, with his disavowal of adult responsibility, receives the brunt of it, but Joe’s gambling wears on his friends as well. But their friendship can weather these bumps. One of the show’s recurring visual motifs is of the three men hiking up a hill -- they don’t ever seem to get to the top, but no one complains.

“Men of a Certain Age” is as much about these actors overcoming the burdens of their histories as their characters navigating the obstacles of middle age. Romano, tender and hesitant, is a world away from the knee-jerk yuk-dropper of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Bakula, best known as the mildly square Dr. Sam Beckett on “Quantum Leap,” gets to play a full-fledged Lothario (an emotionally hapless one, but still).

Braugher’s known best for his portrayal of the ferocious detective Frank Pembleton on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” so his beleaguered Owen might seem like an unreasonable stretch. But Pembleton always had a vulnerability under his swagger that brought the character down to human scale.

There are flickers of that in Owen, a character with almost no backbone. For one thing, he’s doughy. In one scene, he sits down in bed and strips to a pair of white underpants: In essence, he’s a baby.

His wife, Melissa (Lisa Gay Hamilton), fights battles on his behalf. Owen works, unhappily, at the family car dealership (this week, his father passes off another, more successful salesman as his son). When the contractor working on his home skipped out, he was forced to move his family in with his father -- defeated and infantilized, at work and at home.

That he’s changing and growing is a given, but he should be mindful: Even this show’s happy endings come with black eyes.

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