A comedy set at a dating service would seem to offer endless creative possibilities, from the oddballs looking for love to the bad romance jokes. Who doesn’t have a date from hell story?

But while UPN’s “Love, Inc.,” has a cute concept, the execution falls flat, and it's made worse by being in the wrong timeslot on the wrong night. “Love" regularly airs Thursdays at 8:30, following "Everybody Hates Chris," though tonight it's getting a special outing at 9 as the replacement for recently canceled “Sex, Love and Secrets.” 

“Love's" laughs come easily when it's at the expense of the hopeless weirdos who come to Love, Inc., looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right, perhaps too easily. They seem irresistible. Yet they are not enough to carry the series, which has been airing for several weeks to only so-so ratings.

What "Love" lacks is what any situation comedy demands, strong central characters to drive the plot. The walk-on players, the clients of the dating service, are the situation that makes the comedy possible. But the actual comedy must emerge from how the lead characters, the operators of the dating service, react to them.

"Love's" lead actress, Busy Philipps, was a last-minute substitute for Shannen Doherty, who got the axe, presumably for the best reasons. Philipps deserves the axe too. She whines through her every line. The three supporting actors, though far more appealing, don’t move the storyline forward, pushing as they must against the rock of creative inertia that is Philipps' character.

The storyline, such as it is, is that Philipps is an expert in love who can’t get her own love life together. This device was obviously intended to be ironic, but as handled by "Love's" producers, who include former NBC boss Warren Littlefield, Philipps seems merely moronic in her various dating faux pas. In one episode she stresses over what to write on a birthday card to her new beau. In another she pretends to love animals, even though she hates them, in order to woo a veterinarian.

The viewer can only surmise that: a) this woman must suck at her job, being inept as she is at dating, and b) there is no line that Philipps, the usually competent former “Dawson’s Creek” star, can’t say through her nose. She could take down Fran Drescher in a screech-off.

Clea (Holly Robinson Peete), the 40-year-old owner of Love, Inc., has some funny one-liners, and she continues this season’s welcome trend of older women (“Hot Properties’” Gail O’Grady and at midseason “Old Christine’s” Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) playing intelligent and sexy characters. But she and other supporting castmembers Francine (the utterly adorable Regan Gomez-Preston) and Barry (Vince Vieluf) don’t get well-reasoned storylines.

In one episode, Francine tries to help Nathan (“Scrubs’” Neil Flynn) find a match. Nathan is an accountant at a hip-hop magazine, and he talks like Snoop Dogg. Unlike Snoop, Nathan is a 6-foot-5 white doofus who should not ever be allowed to say things like “For-shizzle.”

But the episode loses its punch when out of nowhere Nathan confesses to Francine that he’s her long-lost father. Say wha? This is a light, frothy sitcom, or was until that exceedingly out-of-place moment. What were the writers thinking?

“Love” has one of the best slots on UPN’s schedule, airing after freshman hit “Chris,” which tells us network executives had big hopes for the show.
 

They have to be disappointed. “Love” ratings have been improving the past few weeks, especially among UPN’s target demo women 18-34, but it’s still losing nearly a third of “Chris’” total viewers. The shows are not compatible.  “Love” is bubbly, soft and wants to be hip, “Chris” is cynical, edgy and actually is hip without trying so hard. There’s not a lot of crossover audience there.

UPN should move “Love” to Monday nights, where it would make a very good lead-out to the similarly woman-centric “Girlfriends.” Perhaps the network could also buy Philipps a dog muzzle. Then the show might be worth keeping.