As a haven for former stars of teen comedies from the 1980s, CBS is aces.
    But as to its success as a programmer of scripted series for the midseason, the jury is still out.
    The actors in question are Mary Stuart Masterson and Jason Bateman, featured in the new CBS shows "Kate Brasher" (Saturdays, 9-10 p.m. ET, beginning Feb. 24) and "Some of My Best Friends" (Wednesdays, 8-8:30 p.m. ET, beginning this Wednesday). 
   Masterson and Bateman are great nostalgia bait, but neither make for mandatory primetime attractions.
   Masterson is best remembered as a fetching high-school tomboy from the 1987 cult favorite "Some Kind of Wonderful." She played a tomboy drummer from the wrong side of the tracks, but you fell in love with her anyway. 
    Now, at 35, she's making her first TV series appearance in "Brasher," depicting a plucky single mom raising two teenagers while struggling to make ends meet. 
   After impressing the right people with the aforementioned pluck, she gets a job at a community advocacy center where she spreads desperately needed sunshine to jaded co-workers played by primetime veterans Hector Elizondo ("Chicago Hope") and Rhea Perlman ("Cheers").
  "Brasher" is poignant and female-friendly enough to serve as a better lead-out than dying dinosaur "Walker Texas Ranger" to the equally poignant and female-friendly "That's Life" at 8 p.m. 
   Whether viewers will stick around afterward is the real test, and "Brasher" has an almost PAX-ish tone that clashes with the edgy sensibility of 10 p.m.'s emerging hit "The District."
    CBS begins promotional spots for "Brasher" with the description "from the makers of 'Erin Brockovich,'" but that's an understatement: The series outright borrows that Oscar-nominated film's sexy working-class heroine formula. Also, nepotism alert: Perlman's husband, Danny DeVito, is one of the principals of the production company that brought "Brasher" to CBS.
    CBS's other new series will start out on Wednesdays at 8 p.m., a tall order for any sitcom, especially the over-hyped "Bette," which was stupidly scheduled there opposite ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" when the season began.
   Based on the independent film "Kiss Me Guido," "Some" chronicles the mismatched roommates of a macho Italian dim bulb and a sensitive gay writer. The result is a tame fusion of "The Odd Couple" and "Will & Grace." 
    My bet is that "W&G" is CBS honcho Les Moonves' favorite sitcom.  Why else would his network's development slate be so crowded with gay-themed sitcoms? 
    Former "thirtysomething" star Ken Olin just landed a comedy about a gay man who has to raise two teenagers and Ellen DeGeneres has a sitcom vehicle for herself in 2001 as well.
   "Some" not only overdoses on gay-stereotype humor, but Jews and Asians get zinged, too. However, another ethnicity gets it far worse: The bigoted, narrow-minded, marble-mouthed chowderheads that pass for Italians on this show make characters on "The Sopranos" seem genteel by comparison. 
  What really fascinates me about "Some" is the casting of Bateman (who plays the gay writer). If a nuclear war destroyed the world, this guy would survive to keep the cockroaches company. He has at least seven different sitcoms to his credit since breaking through on the NBC hit "Silver Spoons" (1982-84), where he played a reincarnation of Eddie Haskell to Rick Schroder's Wally Cleaver. 
     The height of Bateman's career was his brave performance in the deeply moving update to Kafka's "Metamorphosis" known as "Teen Wolf 2."
    Fast-forward two decades later, and Bateman is back on TV. Schroder stars on "NYPD Blue." He will be joined on the force next season by Mark Paul Gosselaar, former pin-up from the long-running teen series "Saved By the Bell." "Punky Brewster" star Soleil Moon Frye is on "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch."
     These are strange times, my friends. I awake in the dead of night and an urgent proclamation escapes my lips: "Come back to TV, Kirk Cameron!" We need you now more than ever.

-Andrew Wallenstein is the television critic for Media Life.

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