TV: Cavemen / Carpoolers (ABC, Tuesday 8/7, 8:30/7:30)

Another pair to be dismissed in tandem.

There's been a lot of talk in the last few years about whether or not the sitcom is dead. I happen to think it's not, and that there are a lot of fine sitcoms out there -- 30 Rock, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, My Name Is Earl, just to name three.

But if you wanted to kill the sitcom, shows like these would do the trick just fine.

Cavemen is the single unfunniest half-hour I've ever endured. I didn't laugh, chuckle, or even smile once. The caveman makeup is incredibly unattractive, and it's impossible to distinguish the three principal characters from one another (one of them sometimes wears glasses, but that's the only distinguishing characteristing I could find). The scary thing is that the show we saw last night was overhauled after TV critics responded poorly to the original pilot a few months back; that means that somewhere, there exists a version of Cavemen that is even worse than this.

Carpoolers is marginally better -- this is not, I hasten to add, to say that it's actually good -- if only because you can see the germ of a funny idea buried deep within it. You could make an interesting show about four guys who don't really know one another well or have much in common, but who have to spend 90 minutes a day in close quarters and find themselves sharing their lives in a more intimate fashion than they are accustomed to. (Heck, HBO could probably find a way to do the entire thing in real-time, set entirely within the car, one commute per episode.)

But this show isn't that. This is stale sitcom material; the first episode actually centers on a guy's fear that his wife might make more money than he does, a plot which last seemed fresh and relevant somewhere around 1974. And what is with the character names? In what particular suburban hellhole would you find four men named Dougie, Aubrey, Laird, and Gracen (not to mention Gracen's son, Marmaduke)?

ABC is having particularly bad luck with the traditional half-hour sitcom these days; their last such Emmy nominee, for instance, was Home Improvement in 1994. Shows like this aren't going to improve that record.