By Troy Patterson

Whatever measure of excitement attended the recent premiere of "Kitchen Confidential" owed to its being the work of Darren Star. A veteran of Aaron Spelling's soap factory, Star was the man shrewd enough to see that Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City" could be tarted up and sold as a fairy tale for modern girls: "Mary Tyler Moore" in the Meatpacking District, with vibrators. One property of "Sex and the City's" sophisticated cheesiness is that a New Yorker can simultaneously revel in and scoff at its cartoon idea of the city. "I kind of watch it just to hate it," my sweetheart says. "It's trashy and ridiculous." I cannot have been alone in imagining that Anthony Bourdain's frisky memoir of restaurant life would inspire Star to similar heights of mock glamour and depths of soft-core sleaze.

But the show is dull—too dull to hate, even. Bradley Cooper, terrifically despicable last summer as a preppy prick in Wedding Crashers, plays Jack Bourdain, Anthony's fictionalized alter-ego. Jack is a has-been celebrity chef, and a montage early in the pilot episode depicts the circumstances of this lovable scamp's flame-out—his rock-star petulance and playboy lechery, his boozing and binging, the punch he threw at his boss. Jack's old restaurant is called Icarus, which would make Jack the high-flying boy with wax wings slain by his own heedlessness. Now, after a tenure in some culinary Nowheresville, a clean-and-sober Jack gets a sudden shot at a prestige gig. "I've gotta assemble a crew in less than 48 hours," he cries, around which point Sweetie began groaning at the low obviousness of it all.

Yes, the crew is a ragtag assortment of stock characters. Yes, Jack and the restaurant's hostess, Mimi, feel the first stirrings of Sam-and-Diane-type romantic antagonism. Yes, at the end of the episode, the toughest critic in town confirms Jack's genius.

Despite such banality, "Kitchen Confidential" is eager to prove that it's got a bookish streak. Jack's kitchen master, for instance, is one Steven Daedelus, as in Stephen Dedalus, as in James Joyce and also pointing pointlessly back to that Icarus reference. Huh? Just as the show's mildly naughty mentions of sex and drugs aim for some titillating "edginess," those bookish bits are its lame bid for lit cred—and maybe also the writers' cynical wink at an educated audience: We swear that deep-down we're clever.

Meanwhile, over on NBC, Jason Lee is the lovable scamp on "My Name Is Earl". "It's the upscale redneck show," as the Times summarized an exec's pitch at last spring's network upfronts. The redneck part is clear and accounts for the whole concept: Jason Lee is Earl, a good-for-nuthin' boy with a lazy drawl and a handlebar moustache. After winning 100 grand in the scratch of a lotto ticket—and, while attached to a morphine drip, taking in some chat-show patter about karma—Earl decides to make a list of the several hundred major wrongs he's committed in his tallboy-swigging life ("helped myself to Crab Shack tip jar," "pantsed a party clown," and so forth). Aided by his boorish brother (Ethan Suplee, round as a hedgehog, sending off clouds of filth like Pigpen) and their foxy motel maid (one Nadine Velazquez, her hair Farrah-feathered), he makes amends. In the pilot, he seeks to ease the loneliness of Kenny James, a kid he'd bullied back in grade school. A visit from the "daytime hooker" fails to do the trick; Kenny does not swing that way. So Earl, overcoming his homophobia, instead makes good by accompanying shy Kenny to a gay dance club. Yes, there is a light-hearted heart-warming conclusion.

"Upscale," in this context, is a synonym for "quirky," and quirky only gets you so far. Though the show's jokes are shaped in an eccentric, absurdist way that suggests a less misanthropic "Arrested Development," they're still largely the stuff of prime-time convention. And the pork-rind-flavored milieu here, potentially the setting for all manner of great gags beyond the pale of upwardly mobile Sitcomland, seems presented for your condescension. Lee imbues Earl with real sweetness—if the show maintains the smash ratings of its debut, it'll be on account of his endearing eyes—but most of the characters exist to be mocked as hicks. Still, "My Name Is Earl" possesses the modest volumes of cleverness and ambition needed to win over the jaded press that turned it into one of the fall's big hypes.

NONE Of those hypes is bigger than "Everybody Hates Chris," both a critical fave and a marketing coup. Even if you didn't see its premiere on UPN last Thursday, you may have screened it on an airplane or scored a DVD in the mail, and I feel like a dope repeating the premise: Before Chris Rock was a comedian, he was a 13-year-old wiseass growing up poor but proud in Bed-Stuy with a father who worked three jobs and a mother who sent him to a junior high school where, as the only black kid, he developed his wit in response to constant bullying. Like everybody else, I think the show's funny.

But it's not the charged and scabrous humor of Rock's stand-up act and his old HBO show. The show is uncommonly cozy and slyly gentle. Its lynchpin is Tichina Arnold, who plays Mrs. Rock. She turns what could be a caricature of sass and tough-love into a round portrait of a vigilant mother. In a season of network sitcoms slavering to demonstrate edginess and off-beat charm, it turns out that there's nothing more radical than her old-fashioned warmth.