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Less Than Lovable Raymond

"Everybody Loves Raymond," a new CBS sitcom about a sportswriter with lots of problems at home, is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. It just kind of whelms. The comedy is basically gentle and unassuming, though, and at least it's short on harsh abrasives.

Stand-up comic Ray Romano plays Raymond Barone in the show, which premieres at 8:30 tonight on Channel 9, and begins it promisingly by looking into the camera and introducing himself and his middle-class Long Island environment. He has a wife (Patricia Heaton) and three kids, but his biggest woe is across the street.

That's where his picky, persnickety parents live.

Dad, played winningly by Peter Boyle, is not so bad, except that he always unbuckles his pants when he sits down in the living room easy chair. But Mom (old pro Doris Roberts) does such things as burst in with a box of baking soda because, she says, "I smelled something questionable in the fridge" the last time she came over. Which was yesterday.

When her kids give her a membership in one of those Fruit of the Month clubs, she screams hysterically because she thinks it's "some kind of a cult."

It does seem that Ray's problems could be solved by a simple consultation from Ann Landers, but then there'd be no show. So he tolerates his parents' meddling and his wife's complaining about his parents' meddling, and the idea is to make all this funny. Some of it is.

Romano looks like a cross between Howard Stern and Joe Namath, and he has a monotonish voice like Gabe Kaplan. That's hardly a thrilling combination, but the easy, chatty tone is somewhat disarming, especially considering the daily pandemonium that surrounds it.

Romano's low point occurs when his wife gives him a wink as she ascends the staircase and he exclaims, "I think I'm having sex! Ohhh, good old sex! Oh, I'm gonna do new stuff." Needless to say, his best-laid plans, as it were, go way awry.

The show is produced by David Letterman's Worldwide Pants Co. Cutting edge it most decidedly ain't.

Writer-producer Philip Rosenthal may have made the wife too much of a witch and the husband too much of a worm for them to be entirely sympathetic, but perhaps they'll mellow out as the weeks go on (if the weeks go on). One deftly deployed grace note is Brad Garrett as Ray's jealous brother Robert, who gets to utter the title line -- as a soulful lament. Garrett played the deranged mechanic Tony who stole Jerry's Saab on "Seinfeld" last season.

Robert is a great big lovable blob of humanity, which is not quite an apt description of the show itself. Not great, not big, not lovable, maybe a blob -- but at least it ranks among the less annoying of the season's new sitcoms.