'Big Time' a good time for all

"Steve Harvey's Big Time" is a pleasant surprise. It's fun, entertaining and completely family friendly.

It's sort of David Letterman's "Stupid Human Tricks." Or more like "People Do the Darndest Things," with Harvey in the Bill Cosby role. And he's great at it.

Harvey meets the folks, talks to them a bit and lets them do their thing — weird thing, unusual thing, amusing thing.

Tonight's premiere (7 p.m., WB/Ch. 30) features a 10-year-old white boy who makes like the Godfather of Soul — the hardest working man in show business — James Brown. And a 4-year-old girl who knows the names of seemingly everybody in every political office in the world. And a skinny white guy who has Harvey handcuff him before he stuffs himself inside a washing machine and goes for a spin.

"My oh my, how times have changed," Harvey says. "I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this."

The format is loose — none of it is scripted, and Harvey reacts to the folks he's meeting for the first time.

"I never meet the people beforehand and sit down and try to work stuff out with them," Harvey said. "I just like it to be clean."

And it's clean in terms of content as well. Parents don't have to worry about what might be said; kids don't have to be embarrassed to watch with their parents.

Plus, there's something refreshing about what's essentially a talk-show hybrid that doesn't feature celebrities.

"People love to see regular people getting a shot and watch them either do great or fall on their face. People tune in to see that," Harvey said. "And 'Big Time' is really just an opportunity to get people do some really different things."

And make viewers laugh.

RUN OF THE HOUSE (8:30 p.m., WB/Ch. 30): The set-up here is sort of dopey, but the result is a relatively harmless, lightly amusing sitcom aimed at the kids who might be watching "What I Like About You" at 8 p.m.

This is, in a way, every kid's dream. Fifteen-year-old Brooke (Margo Harshman) has the "run of the house" when her parents head off to Arizona for health reasons. (Hey, isn't that how they wrote Ma and Pa Walton off that show way back when?)