'Married' to hicks, rubes and yokels

If you can get past the fact that "Married to the Kellys" (tonight at 7:30 on Ch. 4) is yet another Hollywood vision of middle Americans as hicks, rubes and yokels, there are a few laughs in this new ABC sitcom.

Not a lot, but a few.

Breckin Meyer, who headlined the mercifully short-lived "Inside Schwartz" a couple of years ago, stars as Tom, a New York City-born-and-bred writer who sort of sees everything between the right and left coasts as empty space. But he and his wife, Susan (Kiele Sanchez) pick up and move to Kansas to be close to her family. The Kelly family.

A family populated by hicks, rubes and yokels. Not to mention the bigoted uncle who isn't exactly thrilled that Tom is Jewish.

Susan's mother, Sandy (Nancy Lenehan) is sweet, charming and determined to run everyone's lives. Just be sure you don't end up in her doghouse. Her father, Bill (Sam Anderson), seems to just want to keep his wife happy. Her sister, Mary (Emily Rutherfurd), is an overbearing know-it-all who, along with her husband, Chris (Josh Braaten), is competitive about everything. And her brother, Lewis (Derek Waters), is just plain weird — he relates better to bugs than to people.

Their interactions with Tom can be amusing, but there's that underlying message that people from New York City are just so much smarter and sophisticated than the folks who shuck corn and play parlor games.

And there's a scene in Friday's pilot that's quite telling. As the Kellys sit down to dinner, they begin to sing grace — a little song familiar to millions of Americans who have attended summer camp of one sort or another. And the audience laughs.

Creator/executive producer Tom Hertz, a New Yorker who based the show on his own wife's Midwest family, insists that we're supposed to be laughing at the character of Tom, who's visibly uncomfortable. But that's not the way it plays out — the audience is laughing at this family that prays before the meal.

Speaking to a room full of TV critics recently, Hertz disputed the assessment that he was portraying middle Americans as "yokels, rubes and bumpkins."

"Why do you think this show follows that pattern?" he asked one of my colleagues.

"Because I've seen it," the critic replied.

Exactly.

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E-MAIL: pierce@desnews.com

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