HANK. 8 tonight, Channel 6.

THE MIDDLE. 8:30 tonight, Channel 6.

TWO SEASONS ago, "Frasier's" Kelsey Grammer and "Everybody Loves Raymond's" Patricia Heaton were battling news anchors in Fox's one-season wonder, "Back to You."

Tonight, they're merely back-to-back in two new ABC sitcoms that suggest how random comedy success really is, even for those with track records.

Heaton stars in "The Middle," a single-camera sitcom about a Midwestern wife and mother named Frankie Heck that was created by Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, whose credits include "Murphy Brown," "Roseanne" and "How I Met Your Mother."

Frankie's unlikely to make anyone forget Debra Barone, the brook-no-nonsense wife who gave "Everybody Loves Raymond" much of its bite, but she's a genuine character in her own right and "The Middle" worth checking out as the lead-in to the season's best new comedy, ABC's "Modern Family."

Grammer's "Hank," on the other hand, is the kind of show that Grammer - who has, after all, already had lightning strike twice in his career, starting with "Cheers" - might want to forget as soon as possible, despite its having been written by Tucker Cawley, an Emmy-winning veteran of "Raymond."

What the two shows have in common, other than their stars' shared credit and mildly peculiar younger sons (more about them later), is an acknowledgment that times are a bit tougher than the network that gave us "Dirty Sexy Money" and assorted other shows about the affluent once seemed to notice.

For the Hecks - she sells cars, or at least tries to, and Mike ("Scrubs'" Neil Flynn) manages a local quarry - that probably isn't news.

For Grammer's Hank Pryor, recently fired as CEO of the sporting-goods chain he founded, it's the only news.

Fleeing Manhattan with wife Tilly (Melinda McGraw) and their two children, Maddie (Jordan Hinson) and Henry (Nathan Gamble), Hank returns to the couple's hometown of River Bend, Va., where he's aghast to find himself in what most of us might consider a nice enough house.

With, OK, a stove in the middle of the living room.

Faced with spending that time with the family of which departing executives so often speak, he finds himself at a loss to communicate with them, beyond pompous pronouncements.

Pompous is one of Grammer's best things, and you could see where the idea might have seemed funny enough on paper, at least before it was actually committed to paper.

But in "Hank," pompous comes off as merely pitiful.

Or it would, if you could waste even a moment feeling sorry for anyone but the viewers, for whom the laugh track's likely to serve as a bitter reminder that somewhere, someone else is having a good time.

If "The Middle" reminds me a little of Fox's long-running comedy "Malcolm in the Middle," it probably has less to do with the title than with Atticus Shaffer, the actor playing the Hecks' oddball youngest child, Brick.

Reprising his role from a 2007 pilot that starred Ricki Lake as his mother, Shaffer looks like a younger edition of Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey on "Malcolm."

His brother, played by West Chester's Charlie McDermott, is an often-shirtless jock named Axl, his sister Sue (Eden Shur) an optimist with more enthusiasm and talent who tonight goes out for show choir - can I just say that before Fox's "Glee" I had never even heard of "show choir"? - and they're apparently not meant to be smarter or funnier than their parents, which makes for a change from far too many sitcoms.

But Shaffer's Brick is the kind of kid who keeps loving parents awake at night: His imaginary friend is a backpack, and his school would just like to run a few tests.

In the range of Boys Who Worry Their Parents, that puts him somewhere between "Hank's" Henry, who sometimes talks like Yoda and at one point declares, "Virginia is awesome - I can't wait to go to the bathroom here!" and the boy in NBC's midseason show, "Parenthood," who has Asperger's-like issues similar to those of his counterpart in the original film.

The young boys in "Modern Family" aren't exactly typical, either.

Yet it's Brick's differences that both trigger some of the comedy in "The Middle" and make his parents, whose apparently low expectations for their two older children might not paint them in the most sympathetic light, seem like, well, parents.

All sitcom families may not be alike, but they all need to be families first.

Get that part right, and the funny will follow.

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.