Oct 27, 2014 3 min read

Two late entries into the generally pallid fall sitcom season are somewhat old fashioned, and that sounds funny when one of the shows is about a family of sports-crazy Boston Irish Catholics trying to get their gay son/brother hooked up.

“Benched,” a “Night Court” for the new century premiering Tuesday, is about a high-powered corporate attorney named Nina Whitley (Eliza Coupe, “Happy Endings”), who loses her job after a hilariously painful meltdown when she’s passed over for partner in her law firm on the same day her tool of a boyfriend, Trent (Carter MacIntyre, “Drop Dead Diva”), dumps her over the phone.

With her reputation permanently soiled in the world of corporate law, Nina ends up taking a job as the best dressed public defender in town and working with a motley assortment of low-end criminals and an equally motley assortment of PD’s including alcoholic Sheryl (Maria Bamford, “Arrested Development”), resentful drone Carlos (Oscar Nunez, “The Office”) and former hot shot Phil (Jay Harrington, “Better Off Ted”).

The show’s humor is grounded in Nina’s fish out of water career adjustment to a far less-glamorous job and world, which may sound rather obvious, but works because of terrific writing by co-creators Michaela Watkins and Damon Jones.

Nina’s boss in the public defenders’ office also happens to be the blue collar patriarch of a Boston family obsessed with sports. Well, not really, but Jack McGee (“Common Law”) plays Burt in “Benched” and high school basketball coach Arthur McCarthy in “The McCarthys,” premiering Thursday on CBS.

The show was created by Brian Gallivan and has a winning sense of authenticity about it in some aspects, or should for anyone who’s ever lived in Boston.

Arthur and his wife Marjorie (Laurie Metcalfe, “Roseanne”) are the parents of four adult children, including Ronny, 29 (Tyler Ritter, “Modern Family”), a high school guidance counselor who is gay, which is actually not the reason he sometimes feels like an outsider in his family.

The real reason is that his dad and siblings Gerard (Joey McIntyre), Sean (Jimmy Dunn) and Jackie (Karen Coleman) live, breathe and talk sports, or, as Ronny puts it, “the sports.”

Except for mom asking Ronny if he’s “still gay,” the family is fine with his sexuality, so much so that they worry that he hasn’t met the right man yet. Their only disappointment is that Ronny has no interest at all in sports, with or without the “the.” Instead, and a little too cliched, Ronny’s taste runs to opera and fine arts, subjects over which he and his mother can bond.

The show is moderately entertaining, but the cast in general bumps things up a notch and Metcalfe bumps them up several more.

I wish the humor of “The McCarthys” showed signs of having evolved beyond that of the elder Ritter’s career-making show.

But with better writing and much needed avoidance of gay cliches, “The McCarthys” could still catch on. At the start, people will tune in because of Metcalfe and Ritter, or because maybe they still have a lot of McIntyre’s New Kids on the Block LP’s on their shelves.

Four stars out of five: Benched, sitcom, 10:30 p.m. ET/PT Tuesday, USA

Three stars out of five: The McCarthys, sitcom, 9:30 p.m.ET/PT Thursday, CBS