Mike & Molly

Frankly, the premiere's funniest don't focus on weight (these are also the lines featured most frequently in trailers, suggesting that someone is aware of the line the fat jokes are walking). Let's hope for a time-soon-when Mike & Molly runs out of fat jokes and moves on to explore the dynamics of two people falling in love while working to overcome personal demons.

The potential for cringeworthiness is high, and the pilot sometimes falls on the wrong side of the line between self-deprecatingly comic and just plain mean. But there's a real sweetness to the tentative romance brewing between Mike, the beat cop played by comic Billy Gardell, and Molly, an elementary school teacher (Melissa McCarthy).

If you walk away from the Mike & Molly pilot and tell me that you hate it, because the only version you remember is the grating, pratfall-laden "laughing at" version, I can't say you're wrong. I can try to point you to the better parts of the pilot, like Mike's "share" to the Overeaters Anonymous group or his very different "share" to Molly's class of students, but as Chris Farley could have told you, those things don't get cheers like the "fat guy falls down" hijinks.

Many of those gags are mechanical and flat, although they are delivered as though they were not. But when the leads are focused on each other, size no longer matters and the show flickers to life.

The show almost lost me early on with a clumsy gag when Molly's workout routine is upstaged by mom and sis eating chocolate cake right in front of her. (Who would do that?) But it gets better from there, although the whole enterprise seems like a lot of empty (for now) calories.

Mike & Molly unquestionably has a lot of funny moments. But realizing you've just been laughing at 22 consecutive minutes of socially unredeemed fat jokes may leave you feeling as if you've just eaten a 36-inch anchovy-and-pineapple pizza: bloated and yucky.

Here, the mix of schadenfreude and reductionism coming from the writers makes Mike & Molly cold and calculating, despite its likable leads and cast.

There's something blandly nutrition-less and sugary about Mike & Molly, CBS's new Hostess Twinkie of a Monday night sitcom.