Hank Stuever reviews ABC's 'Romantically Challenged'

Of all the ways to wince at new television shows, there is none more painful than the wince one makes while witnessing the clunk of a freshly failed sitcom. "Romantically Challenged," debuting Monday night on ABC, is robotically assembled from spare parts, including a coffeehouse where the same booth is always available for too-sharply-focused banter among nitwits.

How does this happen again and again? Someone out there still believes in the two-plus-two-equals-four sitcom, done the old-fashioned way with the ha-ha-ha's supplied by a studio audience laughing at characters who live in open-floor-plan apartments that are as huge as airport terminals. And why wouldn't they still believe, after admiring the Monday-night legions who tune in to watch "How I Met Your Mother," "Two and a Half Men" and "The Big Bang Theory" over on CBS?

Alyssa Milano stars in "Romantically Challenged" as Rebecca, a divorced mother who's ready to "try again." (At love; and worse, at sitcoms.) "I've never had a one-night stand," she admits to her regular kaffeeklatsch, a group that includes her pert, snarky sister, Lisa (Kelly Stables), her childhood friend Perry (Kyle Bornheimer, who was in the much better, also doomed "Worst Week") and his roommate Shawn (Josh Lawson).

"Really?" Shawn says. "I've never not had a one-night stand."

What, you're not laughing? That could be because all the jokes are about sex and appear to have been salvaged from "How I Met Your Mother's" Goodwill donation box.

Milano, of course, was a sitcom teenager in "Who's the Boss?" back in the 1980s. In a way, that seems like five minutes ago, but there's something about her forced but lovely smile that suggests it's been a billion years. The fact that she is not dead or sitting on Dr. Drew's rehab lap, like a lot of child sitcom stars, is triumph enough. Now she's 37. What to do with her? This? (That?)

This, then: Milano's Rebecca relents and goes on a one-night stand with a man she meets in -- where else? -- the coffeehouse. (Don't wait up for her, teenage-son-who-gets-about-five-seconds-of-screen-time!)

"Did you try his anxiety medicine?" the sister character demands to know, the morning after. "Did you steam open his mail?"

You sort of hope for a fourth-wall moment here, where the stage goes dark except for a spotlight on Milano, who then takes a seat on a wooden stool and performs some sort of feminist monologue about semi-celebrityhood. (Or sports! Milano wrote a book last year about baseball.)

Sadly, it's just another unwise dalliance in sitcom land, where it seems we're never not on a one-night stand.

Romantically Challenged

(30 minutes) premieres at 9:32 p.m. Monday on ABC.