Ellen Gray: 'The New Normal' previews Monday at 10 p.m. on NBC

* THE NEW NORMAL. Previews at 10 p.m. Monday on NBC 10 before moving to 9:30 p.m. Tuesdays the following night.

NOT ALL happy TV families are alike.

Some have more trouble than others getting on the air in Utah.

Leo Tolstoy didn't write for television, but if he did, he probably could have predicted that NBC's "The New Normal," a show from "Glee" producer Ryan Murphy that's about two guys paying a woman $35,000 to have their baby, might run into a few problems with the Salt Lake City station that already refuses to carry "Saturday Night Live."

It probably didn't help that one of the guys who wants to be a dad is played by Andrew Rannells, who starred on Broadway in "The Book of Mormon."

But although NBC's Salt Lake affiliate - which also refused last season to air "The Playboy Club," so, hey, maybe it's not just an antigay thing - is passing on Murphy's sitcom, another station reportedly is going to show "The New Normal" on Saturdays. Right before "SNL."

Which kind of takes a little of the fun out of it.

Because if you're not watching to make a statement about how viewers everywhere should be able to see uplifting shows about nontraditional families who are as good, if not better, than those TV families with single dads and conveniently dead moms that some of us grew up with, then you're going to want it to be funny.

And funny is something I'm still looking to find a little more of in "The New Normal," whose pilot gets a special preview Monday after "The Voice" (along with a repeat airing of the pilot of Matthew Perry's new sitcom, "Go On") before moving to 9:30 Tuesdays the following night.

Pilots can be tricky and this one tries so hard to set up its premise that at times it ends up feeling more like a PSA than a comedy, which can be annoying if you're already on board with same-sex marriage and gay parenting.

And quite likely infuriating if you're not.

Sometimes I wish they could start a show like this in the middle, leaving the long explanations of how everyone got together - and the gratuitous Gwyneth Paltrow cameo - to the third season flashback episode, but that's not the way TV works.

Instead we begin with Bryan Collins (Rannells) making a video in which he tells his future child how "in a faraway land called Ohio . . . four very different people, against all odds, ended up becoming a family."

If only the title "How I Met Your Mother" weren't taken.

Bryan's the kind of guy who'd like to look like Mary Tyler Moore (in her Laura Petrie phase) and who swoons over babies in strollers, while his football-loving partner, David (Justin Bartha, "The Hangover Part II"), isn't so sure at first that they're ready to bring their own human being into the world.

Bryan and David live in Los Angeles, a world away from Ohio, where their future baby's future mother, Goldie (Georgia King) is in the process of making the kind of discovery that's lately become the No. 1 reason women in sitcoms become available again.

But unlike her counterparts in "2 Broke Girls," "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23" and "New Girl," Goldie also has an 8-year-old daughter, Shania (Bebe Wood), who's naturally the smartest, best-adjusted member of her family, and a bigoted grandmother (Ellen Barkin) who doesn't want to be reminded that thanks to a long-ago unplanned pregnancy, she's now a great-grandmother.

"I happen to love the gays. I could never get my hair to look this good without 'em," is maybe the most repeatable thing Barkin gets to say in a show in which she appears to be auditioning to play Archie Bunker in an updated "All in the Family." Which might be something to see.

Goldie's Nana probably isn't going to be the only one who'll have a problem with the nuts and bolts of surrogacy - there's a baby broker's comparison of a woman and an Easy-Bake Oven that I found more cringe-worthy than funny - but Murphy seems so determined to make the whole situation "normal" that he may have forgotten that it's often laughter, not lectures, that brings us together.