• Hank, 8-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, WPLG-ABC 10.

• The Middle, 8:30-9 p.m. Wednesday. WPLG-ABC 10.

Hey, ignore the fact that I don't have six Emmys or a zillion dollars, and pretend just for a second that I'm Rod Serling: You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land where a comedy can die on one network and come back as three separate shows on another. That's right: Welcome to the Back to You Zone.

If you don't remember Back to You, a 2007 sitcom about a down-at-the-heels TV news department, that's probably because you didn't watch it. Nobody did, even though it starred Patricia Heaton and Kelsey Grammer, two of the funniest people on television; and was written by veteran producers Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, who between them have worked on probably half the hit sitcoms of the past two decades (Frasier, Wings, The Golden Girls and Just Shoot Me, to name just a few); and was, by any measure, hilarious. Fox unceremoniously killed it after a single season.

But like the victim of a horror-movie slasher who sloppily stitches himself back together and returns seeking justice, Back to You has seized control of ABC's Wednesday-night lineup. Of the four shows in ABC's new bloc of sitcoms, three have major links to Back to You. Modern Family, which debuted last week to an enormous audience, is produced by Levitan and Lloyd. And now The Middle, starring Heaton as a beleaguered Midwestern wife and mom, and Hank, with Grammer as a newly impoverished zillionaire, are joining the lineup.

If I just compared Heaton's The Middle to a reanimated corpse, I meant it in the nicest possible way. Until watching The Middle, I would have said it was time the sitcom concept of the madcap mom trying to balance kiddies and career got a decent burial, complete with a stake through the heart. But Heaton and producers Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline (who both worked on a long string of successful sitcoms including Murphy Brown and How I Met Your Mother) give the idea new life.

Heaton plays Frankie Heck not as a domestic martyr but a high priestess of mediocrity. As a car saleswoman, she's had more vehicles stolen from her than she's sold in the past month. And as a mom, she's raising kids who range from quirky (``clinically quirky,'' observes a teacher) to downright incompetent. Her parenting advice has pretty much been reduced to telling the kids not to hang around on the edge of the playground at recess: ``It makes you at easy target, like the gazelle that gets separated from the pack.''

If The Middle is animated by an air of cheerful desolation (until you've seen Heaton eat roadkill Twinkies, you don't know the meaning of the word desperate), there's an unfortunate whiff of Marie Antoinette about Grammer's breezily ungrounded Hank. This story of a corporate wheeler-dealer limping pennilessly back to his hometown plays like a Hollywood fantasy of poverty.

From a Park Avenue penthouse to a two-story suburban home! From champagne to beer! Why, poor Hank is even forced to have sex with his own wife! ``It's like we're poor and all we have are our bodies!'' she says in a line that's intended to be funny but, like most of the show, comes across as empty condescension.

Grammer's self-important hauteur has always worked best when it regularly grinds against working-class malice -- provided by his fellow barflies in Cheers, his cynical ex-cop dad in Frasier, or the low-wattage coanchor played by Heaton in Back to You. The missing ingredient in Hank, sadly, is just one inaccessible time slot away.

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