• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 13, 2017

Southerners take it on the chin in a new courtroom comedy on NBC.

According to the way the residents of a fictional South Carolina town are depicted in the show, Southerners are anti-Semitic and homophobic, they drink and smoke, and they love guns. They are also incestuous and stupid.

Of course they are. This is a network TV sitcom. How else would you expect Southerners in a sitcom to be portrayed, even today in 2017? This is one area of stereotyping that is apparently immune to today’s hypersensitivity about cultural and ethnic caricaturing.

In fact, I would say Southerners are right up there with Italian-Americans when it comes to the very short list of groups that continue to be stereotyped without hesitation in movies and TV shows.

In this new sitcom called “Trial & Error,” if the residents of this southern town were depicted in some other way, you wouldn’t have a show. This show’s “comedy” is based solely on the assumption that Southerners are narrow-minded ignoramuses. Otherwise, where, oh, where would the comedy come from?

The show’s premise is this: It’s a “single-camera” comedy -- the device used on many sitcoms today to simulate that the action is being recorded for some sort of unspecified documentary. 

It concerns the violent death of a woman in a small town called East Peck in South Carolina. The lead suspect is a local professor of poetry played by John Lithgow, who once starred in a movie called “Harry and the Hendersons.”

I bring this up because in this TV show, Lithgow’s character is named Larry Henderson -- and I wouldn’t want anyone to become confused. For the record, his character in “Harry and the Hendersons” was named George Henderson.

Names seem to be important to the writers of this show. Another character is named Dwayne Reed, which sounds just like Duane Reade, the drugstore chain in New York City. This even gets pointed out in the show, although it’s doubtful that very many people outside of New York City will have a clue about Duane Reade stores.

For Larry Henderson’s defense, his wealthy in-laws decide that only a Jewish lawyer from New York would be cunning enough to get Larry acquitted. So they hire one. Played by Nicholas D’Agosto, he’s a young guy with no experience in murder cases. 

And naturally, as a Jewish New York lawyer, he’s a fish out of water in East Peck with its population of southern doofuses and idiots. 

Among them is the woman who will act as his legal assistant during the trial. Played by Sherri Shepherd, her gimmick is that she suffers from a variety of syndromes, from dyslexia to something called “face amnesia,” which renders her incapable of remembering what anyone looks like.

A few minutes into the show, however, she announces for no apparent reason that she has no such amnesia when it comes to penises. Why mention this? Because the TV Blog is fascinated by the gratuitous insertion of this word into many new sitcom scripts, although its use has been noted most prominently in the context of the sitcoms on CBS.

If I may be permitted to dip my toes into Freudian waters here for a moment, perhaps NBC has developed penis envy where the success of CBS’s comedies are concerned.

In an effort to be as fair as possible, I watched both episodes of “Trial & Error” that are scheduled to serve as the show’s premiere Tuesday night on NBC before deciding that the 44 minutes I spent doing so was a waste of time.

“Trial & Error” premieres Tuesday (March 14) with two back-to-back episodes at 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Eastern on NBC.