TV REVIEW : ‘Doctor, Doctor’: CBS Comedy Arriving in Critical Condition

“Doctor, Doctor” begins a six-week run (at 10:30 tonight on Channels 2 and 8) deserving of a body bag. There’s some improvement in next week’s second installment of this new CBS comedy, upgrading its condition to critical.

By the end of that second episode, Matt Frewer (“Max Headroom”) has indeed endeared himself as refreshingly eccentric Mike Stratford, the lone maverick in a four-physician partnership whose other members find their profits at least as compelling as their patients.

Frewer gives a nice spontaneity to this rumpled, spacey character who juggles his practice with his other careers as a novelist and medical expert on a local TV show. And there are times when the comedy writing by creator-executive producer Norman Steinberg has an appealingly off-center edge.

Not enough times, however.

The opening half hour, directed by Steinberg, is pathetically unfunny. As Mike first loses a patient, and then loses his girlfriend to Pittsburgh, you’re losing your mind watching this idiocy unfold.

Mike’s devotion to old-fashioned “doctoring” is explored in a sometimes-amusing second episode, where the humor darkens considerably. Directed by John Whitsell, its best moments come in clashes between Mike and his high-tech-minded associates (Julius Carry III, Beau Gravitte and Maureen Mueller), one of whom believes that funerals are “fabulous places to network.” Undermining that, however, are clumsily rendered sequences involving Mike’s gay brother (Tony Carriero) and his narrow-minded father (Dakin Matthews). Ugh!

Funerals are also fabulous occasions for burying some TV series.