The new season’s most unfortunate collision course, pitting the fall’s two best new series against each other in the very definition of a DVR alert, occurs Wednesday at 9/8c.

In one corner: Fox’s exuberant Glee, just picked up for the full season. It airs its best-yet episode (“Preggers”) tonight, which I described thusly in TV Guide Magazine:

This is Glee at its best. Which means it’s Glee at its most. Most extreme. Most hilarious. Most tuneful. Most twisted. And, just when you least expect it, most lump-in-the-throat touching. … The strongest story in “Preggers” goes to effeminate glee member Kurt (Chris Colfer), who “auditions” for the role of kicker on the struggling football team by telling a teammate: “My body is like a rum chocolate soufflé. If I don’t warm it up, it doesn’t rise.” (Cue Beyoncé music.) Meanwhile, the team itself starts rehearsing, glee-style, in hopes it will loosen them up. As Kurt says, quoting from The Art of War, the greatest weapon is the element of surprise. And that’s Glee’s specialty.

In the other corner: the anchor of ABC’s bold all-new comedy lineup: Modern Family, which has been building critical buzz since last May (around the same time Glee was sneak-peeked on Fox), when the network screened it for press and advertisers at its Upfront presentation. Watching it then, in a crowded room that frequently erupted in long laughs, was a special experience. But so is experiencing it in your living room, where you’re likely to want to welcome these diverse and extremely funny family members into your house on a regular basis.

This is one of those shows that doesn’t sound particularly innovative or rib-tickling on paper. It’s all about the execution—and thankfully, the show isn’t overtaken by its mockumentary style of having characters occasionally speak directly to the camera. This show earns its laughter with sharp writing, brilliant casting and characters that hit very close to home while often striking a nerve (mostly the funny bone).

Modern Family takes a fly-on-the-wall look at three very different family units that are indelibly if seemingly improbably interconnected. Jay (Ed O'Neill) is the patriarch, remarried to a much younger Latina spitfire (Sofia Vergara) whose sensitive and doughy son causes Jay major agita. (I recently got a very angry voice mail from a reader who was offended by the idea of this May-December relationship. Believe me, the show finds the absurdity in their union, celebrating without glorifying it.)

Then there’s Claire (Julie Bowen) and Phil (Ty Burrell), the prototypical nuclear family with three kids and a hectic household. Burrell is a scream as the wannabe “cool” dad, who mortifies his kids as he performs the High School Musical dances and then horrifies them whenever he is awkwardly forced to be the disciplinarian. Finally, there’s Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), a gay odd couple—Mitchell is uptight and defensive, Cameron is giddy and carefree—who have just adopted a Vietnamese daughter.

To get to know this family, and the families they’re forming within, is to love them and to laugh at them. Modern Family is a welcome reminder that ABC once cornered the market on great, relatable and hugely entertaining family comedy (Roseanne, Home Improvement), and while this is only at times as broadly hilarious as those more traditional hits, there are many moments that evoke huge laughs. Please see for yourself.

Because of a special Wednesday results show of Dancing With the Stars (the women were much more enjoyable than the men, thankfully), two of ABC’s new comedies, Hank and the promising The Middle, won’t premiere until next week. But Modern Family’s companion piece, the raunchy and rollicking Cougar Town (9:30/8:30c), should give ABC another potent shot at developing a comedy foothold on this night.

The show’s a little frantic and more than a little crude, but the jokes keep coming and many of them score in this depiction of Courteney Cox as a newly divorced and woefully insecure mom of a teenager (just try not to feel old considering this fact) who clumsily, and with no small amount of terror, re-enters the dating scene at the urging of her bratty co-worker Busy Phillips (a hoot). Watching Cox accentuate her body-image flaws may seem preposterous to most of us, but her goofy self-deprecation is quite endearing.

Hers is a big comic performance, whether she’s berating the divorced self-styled “samurai” stud across the suburban street (Josh Hopkins) or mortifying her son (Dan Byrd) or deploring her immature ex (Brian Van Holt) or lamenting with her still-married neighbor (Christa Miller). Scrubs’ Blil Lawrence knows how to bring the irreverently funny, and that's especially true when her first conquest follows her home. For sex, a snack (peanut butter and crackers?), and an encore. This show has polarized many I know who’ve seen it—some are appalled, some are amused. I don't know whether to be ashamed or not to be in the latter camp.

ABC’s other new show for the night is Eastwick (10/9c), an attempt to revisit the late John Updike’s Witches of Eastwick franchise by turning it into a frothy supernatural ABC-style soap of female empowerment. That’s right, it’s Desperate House-witches, featuring a bohemian single-mom artist (Rebecca Romijn), a stressed-out doctor (Jaime Ray Newman) juggling family and a deadbeat husband, and an insecure reporter (Lindsay Price)—all harboring powers that won’t be fully unleashed until the devilish Darryl Van Horne (Paul Gross of Due South and Slings and Arrows) shows up with seductive, manipulative intent. In TV Guide Magazine’s Fall Preview issue, I wrote that the Eastwick pilot feels “like someone put marshmallow fluff in the witches’ brew.” An odd tonal mix with uneven casting that never quite produces the intended magic, it feels like a misfire to me.

But not nearly the disaster of what turns out to be the worst pilot of the fall season. Yes, I saved the worst for last. NBC’s mawkish new nurse melodrama Mercy (8/7c) has no mercy. It spares no cliché. I counted at least 15 groaners, some caricaturing the working class and others the medical genre, in the first 10 minutes, and it never stops. It makes me sorry I ever had a bad word to say about ER in its final undernourished seasons.

There’s not a single authentic moment in this labored, contrived, ridiculously predictable potboiler—call it Grey’s Lobotomy, or October Road with nurses. Taylor Schilling stars stridently as a no-nonsense Jersey nurse who’s back from a tour in Iraq, bullying doctors and juggling [spoiler alert, not that you won’t see it coming] two guys: the cheating but still doting husband she separated from during her military service, and the hot doc she served with overseas (Men in Trees' mumbly James Tupper), who shows up out of nowhere the morning after she reconciles with hubby. As you’d expect—because on Mercy, the diagnosis is never the unexpected—the minute after they clash over a case, Schilling and Tupper go at it in an empty hospital room. This was one of many moments that had me walking away from the TV in horror.

Many of the other most obvious low points involve trapping poor Michelle Trachtenberg in the worst-yet depiction this year of a newbie nurse in colorful scrubs. She simpers, she whines, and, despite having graduated at the top of her class (so we’re told), she acts like an absolute idiot until our heroine takes her under her wing. Rounding out the trio of nurses is Jaime Lee Kirchner as the requisite foxy African-American who wants to ditch this Jersey backwater as soon as she can snag a rich husband.

We learn early on that Schilling’s character suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. Watching Mercy is its own form of TV trauma. Don’t say you weren’t warned.