• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 2, 2017

Oh, Lord, make it stop!

That brief prayer (or lament, if you will) approximates the experience of watching the premiere episode of “9JKL,” a new sitcom premiering Monday night on CBS.

This comedy has it all -- and that’s not a compliment. By “all” I mean it has everything that makes a critic roll his eyes and then suddenly find religion long enough to implore that the Lord put an end to it.

“It's nauseating from the get-go,” I wrote of this show in the very first note I took, which means it took me about half a minute to come to this reaction.

This show is about a 40-ish year-old man -- a recently divorced bachelor and out-of-work actor -- who moves into a New York apartment between the apartments of his parents and his successful surgeon brother.

Hence the title “9JKL” -- which refers to three contiguous apartments on the ninth floor of this fictional Manhattan building. The sitcom's premise: His family members won’t leave him alone.

And unlike any family you know -- such as your own, for example -- this family is obsessed with sex and genitalia, which are subjects they discuss constantly.

The following inventory of vulgarity will be familiar to regular readers of this TV Blog. For example, it took this show just two minutes to get around to referring to this man's testicles.

Not to be outdone, the subject comes up again about around 16 minutes in. It's a different man's testicles this time, however -- this man's father played by Elliott Gould.

It took less than two minutes for this sitcom's overbearing mother -- played by Linda Lavin -- to extol the erotic benefits of a bidet.

The size of the main character's penis is referred to, obliquely, at least twice. There's a semen joke plus a gag (literally) about this man accidentally using his sister-in-law's refrigerated breast milk for cream in his coffee.

Let me please emphasize -- and not for the first time -- that I am not a prude when it comes to “adult” material in comedy.

But the continued reliance on these kinds of lines in the prime-time sitcoms that come off of the broadcast-network assembly line strikes me as not only inappropriate, but wholly uncreative and, more to the point, not funny.

The thought often occurs to me that the people who make these shows and the networks that buy them are better than this. But that thought doesn't linger for long.

This show is adapted from an idea based on the real-life story of actor Mark Feuerstein, who stars in it.

The back story is that, in real life, Feuerstein, normally a California resident, stayed at his parents’ apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when he starred in “Royal Pains” on USA Network -- a show filmed on Long Island (and maybe other places around here too).

In “9JKL,” the guy played by Feuerstein is an unemployed actor who comes to live in an apartment owned by his parents, next door to their own, because his ex-wife got all of his money in their divorce. 

So the sitcom story and the real-life story are really quite different. Heaven knows if the real-life story was funny, but the pilot for this show is not.

In the show, this actor is unemployed because his TV show -- a drama in which he played a blind cop -- was cancelled. That just might happen here in real life too.

Everyone involved in “9JKL” makes their best effort to over-exaggerate every movement and line, while the application of canned laughter would have you think this is the funniest thing in the world, which it isn't.

To be fair, I think this premiere episode -- the only one CBS provided for preview -- suffers from the acute condition known as pilot-itis that I identified last week as a condition afflicting many TV shows.

Still, I can't help thinking that in this day and age, a TV network has to do better with a show's opener than this. Maybe it gets better in Week Two. But after watching Week One, who would want to return for Week Two?

“9JKL” premieres Monday (October 2) at 8:30 p.m. Eastern on CBS.