But there's no sure thing in TV.

Fox bet the ranch on Frasier's Grammer and Everybody Loves Raymond's Heaton two years ago, pairing the two sitcom legends in Back to You. You remember that one, don't you? You don't? I rest my case.

They're separated on ABC, so it's unlikely the whole thing will wind up in the tank, as it did on Fox. If there's any justice, it won't. Heaton's The Middle, at 8:30, is a gently funny entry with a variation on your usual quirky sitcom family, and the fact that they took half the words for the title from Malcolm in the Middle is probably no coincidence.

Grammer's Hank at 8 p.m.? Well, it's a little sad. Instead of resting comfortably on his millions, or trying something new, Grammer trots out the same pompous, blunderbuss blowhard he has been playing since Frasier Crane turned up on Cheers 25 years ago.

This one's named Hank Pryor, a self-made sports equipment mogul. Economics force him and his family to vacate the high life in New York for the low life in Virginia, where he founded his first store.

This move, allegedly, will allow him to achieve a new familiarity with his children, like he'll be able to remember their names.

But it's all bleak and down-and-out in Virginia. Plus, Hank's doofus brother-in-law is there to gloat at his failure.

Little Henry's excited about the move. "Virginia is awesome," he declares. "I can't wait to go to the bathroom here."

But the other three members of the family know things have changed for the worse when they open the door to their new house. It looks like something out of a horror film, remarks teen daughter Maddie. "At least in a horror film, the pretty girl dies."

In a bad sitcom, everybody dies, as the laugh track gets louder and louder, and Hank, though it isn't a horror, has that loud laugh track and the slight, familiar scent of death.

The Middle is its polar opposite, a lively show with no canned laughter, where love has no chance to conquer all the family deficiencies but does make them not only bearable, but fun.

Heaton's Frankie Heck is a mother cum used-car salesman, except that, continually interrupted by minor family emergencies, she's never able to close the deal. Her husband (Neill Flynn) is the standard-issue clueless, deadpan sitcom dad, except that Flynn, as anyone knows who has seen him as the janitor in Scrubs, raises deadpan to an exalted art form.

The three kids help make this one go. Young girls will go for eldest Axl (Charlie McDermott, 19) who, like so many teenage boys, wanders around the house in his underpants speaking in monosyllables. The sparkplugs, however, are weird little Brick (Atticus Shaffer, 11) and middle schooler Sue (Eden Sher, 17), ever enthusiastic despite years of extracurricular failure.

"She's been going through a bit of an awkward stage," Frankie tells us in the narration that's a good part of the comedy, "for the past 13 years."

Sue has some hilarious misadventures after she actually gets into the show choir, but it's Brick, whose best friend is his backpack, who's at least partially responsible for landing his mother in the middle of nowhere in a superhero suit.

And it really is nowhere, because The Middle is already set in nowhere, the fictional Orson, Ind., home of Little Betsy snack cakes, the demolition derby for the homeless, and the world's largest polyurethane cow.

Frankie acknowledges that she lives in The Flyover, which is what bicoastal show-biz moguls contemptuously call everything between Los Angeles and New York.

And frequently in their TV shows they treat it with contempt. Not this time. The Middle is affectionate silliness that should warm the middles of a wide swath of America.

Jonathan Storm:

Hank

8 tonight on 6ABC

The Middle

8:30 tonight on 6ABC