"Worst Week": And after the first week?

Sam is having a bad week. In fact, you could say he's having his worst week since the last time he went to visit his prospective in-laws and accidentally set their house on fire.

Well, the show is called "Worst Week," after all, and as you might guess, Sam's fortunes aren't going to get any better next week, either. Although it will be hard to top what we see in the first half hour of tonight's pilot -- comically bad driving and ill-timed phone calls and impolitic utterances and people stepping in the wrong place at the wrong time and even a man mistaken for a corpse. "Worst Week" is Rube Goldberg meets Murphy's Law meets the parents. And it's hysterical.

After I was done splitting my sides, though, I had a question for this bright new comedy on CBS: How can things possibly be this bad -- I mean good -- next week?

I suppose we can leave that question for later. For now, this is a pretty ambitious effort by the one network that has managed to keep the traditional situation comedy alive on Monday nights by not taking too many chances. "Worst Week," in that sense, is a huge roll of the dice for CBS. It has no studio audience. It doesn't have many jokey-joke punchlines. And the humor builds up, so that the viewer's 22 minutes of undivided attention is required for the full effect. That's a quality "Worst Week" has in common with TV's classic sitcoms, especially "Seinfeld," which has been gone for a decade now (and which once did an entire episode backwards, for heaven's sake).

As the show begins, Sam -- played by Kyle Bornheimer, a comedic actor who just looks hapless -- is talking over with his pretty girlfriend Melanie (Erinn Hayes) their plan for that evening, when they are going to spring the news on her apparently hard-to-please folks that they are expecting a baby.

What becomes clear is that Sam's and Melanie's relationship could only happen on television. He doesn't deserve her in more ways than one. And she is absurdly forgiving of his disastrous decisions.

The details of Sam's last visit to her parents unfold amusingly. Seems everyone but him went out one night, so he decided to "surprise" them with a fire in the fireplace ... and that's when the family dog, thinking the strange man meant his masters harm, attacked.

Defending his actions once more, Sam says, "I'll ask again: Wouldn't you like to have come home to a blazing fire that night?"

"We did," responds Melanie, drily.

Going forward, "Worst Week" faces a couple of challenges: recreating tonight's slow-motion train wreck again and again, and plausibly (or with ironic unreality) allowing Sam to make it up over and over to Melanie and her folks played by Kurtwood Smith (Red on "That 70's Show") and Nancy Lenehan.

I don't know if they can pull it off, but I'm sure willing to watch them try.

Worst Week Premieres 8:30 p.m. CT on CBS (KCTV-5)