I'm rooting for ABC to succeed with its Wednesday comedy strategy. Few TV trends have been more depressing than the decline of prime-time comedy, especially on the network that once hit the heights of Roseanne and Home Improvement and lately has been coasting on the banalities of the thankfully defunct According to Jim.

Last week, the truly special new comedy Modern Family opened to very promising numbers (amid some of the best reviews of the fall season), as did the saucy Cougar Town, and tonight, two more enter the fray, going up against Wednesday’s only other sitcoms (CBS’s The New Adventures of Old Christine/Gary Unmarried combo).

Neither the thoroughly innocuous Hank nor the more amusing, though derivative, The Middle are what you’d call groundbreaking. But even when a show whiffs as badly as Hank does, I’m encouraged by ABC stepping up to the plate with big names that might help establish a comedy beachhead the network so sorely needs.

Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton, who teamed up for the short-lived Back to You two seasons ago, separately headline the new shows. Grammer gets the shorter end of the stick, in part because he’s playing a role that he could do in his sleep.

The title role of Hank is that of a puffed-up buffoon brought low by circumstance, in this case the economic downturn. Booted from the sporting-goods company he founded, he retreats from a life of Manhattan luxury to his small-town Virginia roots, bringing along his family, including two kids he barely knows. “Can’t we all pull together as a family and do as I say?” he bellows at one point, as eyes roll and the laugh track erupts. The premise may be timely, but the execution is so old-school you can’t help but groan, especially when he and his long-suffering wife (Melinda McGraw, a world away from the barracuda she played last season on Mad Men) are forced to snuggle in a relative’s cramped fire-truck kiddie bed.

To its credit, Hank does fill a network void where family-friendly comedy is concerned, but Grammer is just going through the paces here. And I’m not sure a void actually deserves another void. Check out next week’s storyline: “Hank gets back into business by testing his entrepreneurial skills with a neighborhood yard sale.” Are you laughing yet?

Patricia Heaton is also getting back to basics in The Middle as Frankie Heck, a harried Midwestern (hence, the “middle” America of the title) housewife and mother, juggling a frustrating job—trying to sell cars in this economy—and managing three peculiar children while her wry husband (the terrific Neil Flynn, Scrubs’ former janitor) looks on. It’s relatively low-concept, but that worked for her pretty well on Everybody Loves Raymond all those years.

This wacky sitcom owes a larger debt to Malcolm in the Middle in its frantic born-loser slapstick, and there’s more than a little Dewey in the Heck family’s youngest child: the hilarious Atticus Shaffer as Brick, who lives in his own world and has an unnerving habit of repeating words in a spooky whisper. His look when Frankie hands him a frozen pancake for breakfast and orders him to lick it (“It’ll last longer”) sets the broad tone for what follows. Eden Sher also makes a strong impression as their eternally awkward daughter Sue, a gawky optimist who announces she’s joining show choir—she’d be right at home among the misfits of Glee—and can’t understand why her parents suddenly look so stricken. The mayhem that ensues isn’t exactly unexpected, but it is pretty funny.

On ABC, that’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Hank premieres tonight at 8/7c, The Middle at 8:30/7:30c, on ABC