Remember when Fox was the upstart network? Watching its new refried sitcom, Oliver Beene, I idly flashed back to those golden years. When the rude Married with Children blew its first bracing raspberry at the then-reigning Cosby Show, when The Simpsons premiered to up the subversive takedown of American family life, when X-Files began to spout its creepily paranoid vision of Shadow Govt. - those were the days, my friend.

Yeah, Fox was the go-getting new kid on the block. Now it's the tired status quo: a media monolith as set in its ways as any of the original Big Three nets. (One sign of its quotidian predictability: hearty perennial Simpsons included a series of mocking joke crawls lampooning Fox News net's knee-jerk conservatism.) Expecting something new from Fox these days is like waiting for Bill O'Reilly to let a guest he disagrees with finish a sentence. Ain't gonna happen.

It was ever thus. This year's young punk is a later decade's staid corporate poop; one era's peacenik is another's warblogger. Which doesn't make the devolution any less dispiriting to observe.

Which brings me, reluctantly, to that damn Beene show. An unsavory blend of Malcolm In the Middle and The Wonder Years, the sitcom was poised to premiere in the money post-Simpsons timeslot (once more shifting poor King of the Hill to its old pre-Springfield ratings killer spot) and packaged as part of an all-night fake retro lineup. (Lots of TVLand-style graphics on the inbetween promos.) All fun to view from a design standpoint, but not much help for the show itself, which couldn't even get a laff out of Wendie Malick doing her patented Mrs. Robinson.

Set in the early sixties (you just know some programming git sold this in its Sunday spot as Fox's answer to American Dreams), the show follows an N.Y. family through that much-less-tumultuous part of this notorious decade. Title hero, Oliver (Grant Rosenmeyer), is an 11-year-old spudboy with an older bulying brother (Wonder Years/Malcolm comparisons, anyone?), a dentist father played by Murphy Brown's Grant Shaud and a mother (Wendy Makkem) whose most discernible characteristic in the premiere is a propensity for snorting laughs and other nasal sounds. To say that this brood is tame compared to the spirited and eccentric Malcolm clan is an understatement; it's like comparing O'Doul's to Guinness.