‘Lateline,’ ‘For Your Love’ Are Both Short on Laughs

That soaring, stratospheric HBO parody “The Larry Sanders Show” resumed Sunday. Back on earth, meanwhile, NBC initiates a media satire of its own tonight, and the results are numbing. You wonder how “Lateline” even got made.

Created by Al Franken and John Markus, it’s intended primarily to be a sendup of ABC’s “Nightline,” with Franken a calculating nudnik as reporter Al Freundlich and Robert Foxworth playing star anchor Pearce McKenzie, whose job Freundlich thinks he’s getting after the self-absorbed, pontifical Pearce resigns on the air. It turns out to be a strategy to get a salary bump.

“Lateline” reminds you that it’s topical by relentlessly dropping the names of media and political VIPs, a bunch of whom show up as themselves.

On the newsroom front, this is “Murphy Brown” territory. Except that “Lateline” is arriving many years late with many fewer laughs (read: zero). And also with no potential to grow, unlike Candice Bergen’s resilient CBS comedy, whose final season is turning out to be arguably its finest.

In contrast also to Garry Shandling’s sublime sendup of a Leno/Letterman-style talk show and its neurotic host on “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Lateline” is a hammy caricature that relies on cheap gags and silly names, to say nothing of the grating Freundlich. It rejects subtlety, and unlike “The Larry Sanders Show,” it hires public figures, from Alan Dershowitz to John McLaughlin and his reporter pack, to play only that familiar public side of themselves that we already know.

Miguel Ferrer as the fictional late-night newscast’s executive producer and Megyn Price as its producer offer the only counterpoints to Foxworth’s stock character and Franken’s lethal overplaying as the clownish Freundlich. The latter yields no splinter of reality on which to impale the show’s targets and give credibility to its satire.

The very idea of this hapless schnook getting this far without a patina of slickness is absurd. As is the likelihood of Freundlich being suspected, even fleetingly, of anonymously writing a Washington-insider book along the lines of “Primary Colors.”

That novel, “Tangled Banners,” is the hook for a clumsy, especially burlesque Episode 2, its failure affirming just how difficult it is to spoof media and politicians that seem to regularly spoof themselves, and that a very little bit of Franken goes a long way.

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Another NBC series arriving tonight, the couples comedy “For Your Love,” starts amiably before sinking like a brick in water.

At its heart is the assumption that no matter how committed they are to each other, males and females in relationships behave and interact in prescribed ways that inevitably draw them into conflict. In other words, it’s strictly a male-female thing. Boys will be boys and. . . .

In “For Your Love,” this eternal discord concerns three young couples who are determined to prove that guys and “chick stuff” don’t mix, with each gender siding with its own. Newlyweds Mel and Malena Ellis (James Lesure and Holly Robinson Peete) have moved next door to their best friends, Dean and Sheri Winston (D.W. Moffett and Dedee Pfeiffer), much to the dismay of Dean’s bachelor younger brother, Reg (Edafe Blackmon), who’d rather that Dean be less conservative. As for himself, Reg spends a lot of time in and out of bed with his girlfriend, Bobbi (Tamala Jones). They’re the least likable and lowest-brow pair here, their constant trivial bickering being right out of “The Newlywed Game.”

The other two couples are likable enough until descending to a level of absurdity that’s impossible to relate to. For example, though Mel and Malena are written as bright young professionals (he’s a lawyer, she’s a psychiatrist), their conduct grows ever more infantile, such as tonight when Malena learns she may be pregnant. And it gets worse in a future episode when she has an epic snit when learning that Mel didn’t tell her he once dated supermodel Naomi Campbell. This is something to go ballistic over?

Mel: “Sweetie, aren’t you being a little immature?” A lot, in fact.

The cast is competent, with Moffett acting the most effortlessly. Yet there’s not much to relate to here, and what’s worse, not much to laugh about.

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* “For Your Love” premieres at 8:30 tonight, while “Lateline” arrives at 9:30 p.m., both on NBC (Channel 4). The network has rated both shows TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).