Jeff Foxworthy’s strength as a stand-up comic is his punchiness. He excels at tossing off one-liners like, “You might be a redneck if you thought the O.J. trial was a Sunkist and Minute Maid taste test.”

   Foxworthy is funny and quick to the point.
   Unfortunately, his new WB sketch comedy show debuting tonight at 8 p.m. is neither.

   There are two immediate problems with “Blue Collar TV." The sight gags are stupid, even for a skit show, and it is incompatible with the rest of the WB’s angsty lineup.

   But “Blue Collar's" biggest failing is that it plays like an extended Foxworthy stand-up riff. There’s not enough substance to sustain a 3- to 4-minute skit, never mind a full half-hour. 

   The setup is simple. Foxworthy delivers an opening monologue, laying out the night’s theme. In the pilot the theme is family, meaning skits about working-class folk who like their food drenched in gravy and their beer from the can.

   Longer skits are mixed with short recurring bits, such as the Hatfield-McCoy dictionary, giving a redneck take on a regular word. There's a final segment where Foxworthy and stand-up buddies Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy deliver the best bits of the show by completing the statement “I believe.”

    “I believe,” Larry says, “the color of the state flag of Alabama should be primer.” Not bad, perhaps, but hardly the humor to sustain a half-hour show.

Quality of show (on a scale of 10): 4

    The show is “Saturday Night Live” circa 1996 by way of Atlanta. That is to say it features over-the-top gross-outs that aren’t very funny while trying to appeal to a hardcore NASCAR audience. 

   That’s not to say that redneck wit can’t be amusing. Foxworthy and Larry prove so in their Comedy Central stand-up gigs. But “Blue Collar" lacks imagination. A skit about “Dan Brogan’s House of Gravy” never moves beyond the sight gag of pouring gravy over every dish on the table--spaghetti with gravy, ice cream with gravy, steamed veggies with gravy. It makes you want to go for a jog, but it doesn’t make you laugh. 

   There's a car-ride skit featuring the performers as little kids, in a gimmick sure to trigger the “Desperate for Laughs” sign over the audience. There are urine jokes and also jokes using a urine hose. Seeing a 40-year-old man in diapers spurting urine and trying to catch it in his mouth isn’t funny. It’s just disgusting. 

   Foxworthy and Larry succeed on Comedy Central specials by pushing the raunch factor beyond bathroom humor. 
   But that's something they can't do on the WB, and they don't. So we get a limply predictable skit in which a fat family is horrified to learn that their daughter has been dieting. 
   When mom confesses that she tried dieting once but quit “cold turkey,” you just know the next line is going to be a play on eating hot turkey. And it is.

    Taking a few chances would do a lot to liven up this show. Otherwise it’s “HeeHaw” with a better vocabulary and fewer musical guests.

Positioning (on a scale of 10): 2

  One can only imagine the scene at the WB’s summer press tour party: Foxworthy and friends on one side of the room, “Smallville” pretty boy Tom Welling on the other. 

   So no surprise when WB managers decided to  rip up their original schedule, which had “Collar” following “Smallville” on Wednesdays, and move “Collar” and the Drew Carey improv show “Green Screen” to Thursdays to air before the hybrid reality-game show “Studio 7.” 
   The logic seems to be to put all the WB anomalies on one night, but that night also happens to be the most competitive on television. 

    Opposite CBS’s “Survivor,” NBC’s “Joey” and Fox’s “The O.C.” even a quality show would struggle to find an audience. No one at the network can possibly expect big ratings out of any of these shows.

   On a larger scale, though, “Collar” just doesn’t fit with the WB’s teen-targeted image. Though new CEO Garth Ancier says he wants to shift focus to the upper ends of the 12-34 age bracket, “Collar” seems more like a show for blue collar-friendly ABC. 
  Hard-core Foxworthy fans know the show is coming. But 50-year-old white men who might like “Collar” will never discover it on the WB.

Cachet, or the “Arrested Development” factor (on a scale of 10): 3

    Foxworthy had his own ABC sitcom in the 1990s, so he counts as a star of sorts for the WB. Plus, his Comedy Central specials perform well, and he filled arenas during the recent Blue Collar Comedy Tour. That would argue against a quick killoff if ratings are weak.
   But arguments for a speedy cancellation are stronger. Redneck humor, with few exceptions, has never done well on network TV, so expectations have to be low. And of course, more importantly, it's not really a WB show.

Overall (on a scale of 30): 9.