Darlene Hunt plays Darlene (no big stretch there), a sex-obsessed mess with a long trail of therapists in her past, one of the supposedly lovable losers on ABC's new sitcom Help Me Help You. It premieres tonight at 9:30.

Perhaps she's a foil for one or both of the creators, Alexandra Rushfield and Jennifer Konner. Not that they have psychologically sketchy pasts, but they sure are obsessed with sex.

The constant, unfunny discussion of the matter overwhelms even the show's lead character, Dr. Bill Hoffman. The psychotherapist is the latest in a string of mixed up, self-important, and supposedly lovable funny men played by Ted Danson.

"Let's put the genitalia on the back burner," he implores his group-therapy patients in the second episode. They include Darlene, a gay man who doesn't know it, a suicidal nebbish, a socially inept young woman, and a high-powered lawyer with a short fuse who has been ordered to the therapy sessions by the court.

When they're not talking about it, some of them are doing it and others wish they were. Hoffman winds up in the sack with his estranged wife, played by poor Jane Kaczmarek, who will never get an Emmy now, and they discuss whether it was make-up sex, break-up sex, or wake-up sex.

There's no laugh track, so maybe it's all supposed to be sophisticated and delightfully risque. But nobody will be mistaking Rushfield and Konner for Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde.

We could get into a whole discussion of whether mental and emotional illness is proper fodder for TV comedy, but Help Me Help You isn't good enough to inspire the effort.

This is cache, read story here