But the show does have one killer hand that it hasn't fully played yet: Cusack herself. Although she may be best known for relatively small parts in movies starring her brother, John Cusack, Joan always manages to pull a strong performance out of whatever situation she's in -- whether it's serving as an assistant to a hit man in "Grosse Point Blank" or trying to kill off Uncle Fester as a psychotic gold digger in "Addams Family Values." The same is true of her performance in "What About Joan."

Starring in her first television series (excluding her appearance for a year on "Saturday Night Live"), Joan plays a semineurotic high school teacher who is surrounded by close friends and alternately plagued and blessed by her new boyfriend, Jake (Kyle Chandler). Developed by television producer James Brooks ("The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Simpsons") and Gwen Mascai (a National Public Radio essayist), the show's premise is simple, if thin, and it ultimately relies nearly entirely on Cusack's strengths.

And that doesn't always work. In the first episode Tuesday night, Cusack struggles against banal setups -- her boyfriend wants to get married, she freaks out -- and tries to cope with what looks like a genetically engineered, all-too-typical supporting cast. Among the show's six regulars, Wallace Langham plays almost the same tiresome character he played in "Veronica's Closet," and Chandler is just as green-eyed and straight A as he was in "Early Edition," only a mediocre match for Cusack's unhinged schoolteacher. When the show shifts the focus away from Cusack for a subplot or even just for a scene, it falls, fast.

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It's not clear yet exactly what the show wants to be when it grows up. ABC says "the series focuses on the private lives of an intimate group of high school teachers, exploring the complexity and endurance of close friendships among women, as well as the challenging relationship between Joan and Jake ... as they blunder toward intimacy." The problem is that no one watches a sitcom to explore "the complexity ... of close friendships." That's what "Oprah" is for. Sitcoms are for cheap, fulfilling laughs, and they're at their best when they play to our intelligence but don't require much brain activity.

And that's the problem.

For some reason, we're demanding too much, too soon from sitcoms, and that's causing them to self-destruct into endless recasting and reworking, eventual three-episode runs and, finally, cancellation, resulting in a round of embarrassment for everyone involved.

Most significant, even if a show has potential -- and "What About Joan" certainly does -- it's usually not given time to develop. In today's ratings-obsessed, instant-gratification world, network executives, blind to everything but the numbers, often pull a show before there's even the smallest chance for growth. Watch the first season of "Seinfeld" and imagine it being judged from the first half-dozen episodes alone. The cast took several episodes to develop chemistry, and the writers needed just as long to come up with the show's smart, interwoven stories.

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