• Worst Week, 9:30-10 p.m. Monday, WFOR-CBS 4

The lesson of Worst Week is that if that if at first you don't succeed, there's probably a good reason, so just give up and move on. And if at second you don't succeed, sedate yourself. And if at third you don't succeed . . . well, see for yourself, but remember I warned you.

That's right: Worst Week is the third attempt to adapt a BBC sitcom called The Worst Week of My Life about a young couple trying to break the news of their impending marriage to her parents, only to encounter one disaster over another during the course of a week-long holiday.

First Fox and then NBC made pilot episodes but eventually saw the obvious: that while a one-joke premise might succeed in British television, where a ''season'' only lasts three to six episodes, it will suffer brain death long before the last of the 22 or so that American shows air during a year. CBS missed not only that but the sad fact that this version of Worst Week shows dangerous signs of flat-lining before it even gets all the way through the first episode.

Kyle Bornheimer (Jericho) and Erinn Hayes (KitchenConfidential) play Sam and Melanie, the young couple faced with explaining to her stern parents (Kurtwood Smith, That '70s Show, and Nancy Lenehan, My Name is Earl) that they've reversed the normal order of marriage and pregnancy.

Not the easiest task under the best of circumstances, and these aren't the best -- Sam is a magnet for misfortune and mayhem. Drunken co-workers, car wrecks, taxi-puking, power blackouts, misplaced corpses and a truly sordid encounter in the dark with a cooking goose: He attracts it all, sort of like the plagues of Job as imagined by Lucille Ball.

This sort of non-sequitur madcap misadventure can be quite funny -- rent Blake Edwards' Blind Date or Martin Scorsese's After Hours to see it done really well -- but only for a while. Then it becomes enervating. Worst Week certainly has some genuine laughs, but they run out well before the pratfalls and pee-pee jokes do. Let's just cut directly to the divorce episode and be done with it.

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