'Practice' doesn't quite make perfect

Out of Practice
Starring: Christopher Gorham, Paula Marshall, Henry Winkler, Stockard Channing, Ty Burrell
On: CBS, Channel 4
Time: Tonight, 9:30-10

Stockard Channing clearly enjoys doing comedy in CBS's ''Out of Practice." After years on ''The West Wing," she enters the new sitcom's set with great gusto, reveling in showy diva lines such as ''Mama needs a big, fat martini before the symphony." She's a zesty actress playing a garish character, delivering her gags to the gratitude of a clamorous laugh track.

But instead of laughing along, you may find yourself wanting to say ''Shhh." Too much about this sitcom, which premieres tonight at 9:30 on Channel 4, is too loud, too obvious. Channing, the characters, their relationships, the jokes, the applause, they're all dangerously close to seeming vaudevillian. And that's particularly disappointing given the talent involved. The show was created by Christopher Lloyd and Joe Keenan, producers of sitcom's onetime model of subtlety, ''Frasier." And tonight's episode was directed by Kelsey Grammer. Have they all forgotten the value of dimensional characters and scripts that don't go for the jugular?

Still, if someone turns down the volume, ''Out of Practice" has the potential to become a likable, if conventional, sitcom. Channing's costars include Henry Winkler as her bimbo-loving ex-husband, Christopher Gorham as her put-upon younger son, Ty Burrell as her impossibly vain older son, and Paula Marshall as her lesbian daughter. They're like plainer versions of the distorted Bluths of ''Arrested Development," and the actors have a nascent chemistry that could grow amusingly sick. When Channing's Lydia embraces her daughter's lesbianism, then trashes her haircut, you know this is one rapport that could get gnarly.

A few bits are emphasized in the premiere, and now deserve to be laid to rest. All the members of the Barnes family are MDs except Gorham's Ben, who's a marriage counselor, and they don't let him forget it. Despite the fact that he's the only sane one, they pity him. And pity him. And pity him. And then Lydia is repeatedly outraged that Winkler's Stewart is shacking up with his secretary, who is played with predictable sex kittenishness by Jennifer Tilly. The sight of a middle-aged woman going ballistic about her ex-husband's love life is tired material -- too tired even for a first-rate performer like Channing to slap awake.

Let's hope all involved can do some doctoring on ''Out of Practice." With a prescription of the right high blood pressure medication, perhaps it will calm down and we can all relax and enjoy.