Carpoolers is the best surprise of Tuesday nights so far.  I only hope it doesn’t get sucked down the drain by Cavemen.

In fact, Cavemen is such an off-putting concept (hated the Geico commercials, completely uninterested in a sitcom expansion) that I almost didn’t even bother giving Carpoolers a look.  On paper it sounds unremarkable:  the adventures of 4 guys who share a carpool lane, but it’s filled with funny, interesting characters and a plethora of winning actors.

 There’s so much about Carpoolers that inherently makes me smile, from the goofy performance of T.J. Miller as the Napoleon Dynamite-channeling Marmaduke to the calamity of Aubrey’s household (and the fact that we only ever see the reclining feet of his apparently immovable wife) to the sweet naivete of Dougie’s newlywed co-dependency, to the occasional forays into surreal slapstick, such as the scene when Dougie is literally banged about on both sides in his pursuit of Aubrey.  Carpoolers is no Arrested Development of ground breaking genius, but what it is is a sweetly produced bit of good natured comedy with just a tiny bit of edge under the surface without ever losing its big family-friendly heart.

I want to say a little more about Jerry Minor, Fred Goss and Jerry O’Connel.  Jerry Minor is an absolute delight, dithering about like a man who’s only a few moments away from being pushed too far and maybe pulling out a gun, but he plays it with such tender vulnerability that he steals the show everytime he’s onscreen.  I didn’t realize until just now that he played the neighbor on Lucky Louie last year, and contrasting the two performances, he really is a revelation.  As much as I enjoyed Lucky Louie, and I enjoyed it a great deal, I had no idea that this actor was so capable of holding forth just by virtue of playing under the other characters.  He may be the single deciding factor that keeps me coming back.

As for Jerry O’Connell, an actor I haven’t always been fond of, here he shows terrific comic chops and scores a lot of points by his willingness to play Laird as kind of an unnattractive, insensitive, even bullying figure (although his more hostile tones were considerably muted here from the level they were at in the pilot — and I think that’s a good thing) who wins us over by playing the truth of a guy who’s been completely obliterated and demoralized by a divorce.  A lesser actor might not be as willing to dwell in the mud, and it’s a credit to O’Connell that he goes there.

 Fred Goss’s also does an excellent job as a slightly less harried professional man who nonetheless struggles with a looming sense of inadequacy that leaves him vulnerable to being browbeaten and taken advantage of, all at the service of comedy gold, and it’s a pleasure to watch the chemistry between him and Faith Ford as his uberwife and the aforementioned T.J. Miller as perhaps the oddest new character on sitcoms this season.  Between his goofy hair and manchild innocence, it’s almost impossible not to crack a smile when Miller’s Marmaduke is onscreen.

In tonight’s episode, we got to see how the various families can be mixed together, and the results are encouraging, suggesting that this show might have the flexibility to sustain a large variety of plot permutations.  Given Bruce McCullough’s Kids in the Hall pedigree, and last week’s delightful cameos by Scott Thompson, one can’t help but wonder how far out there Bruce is planning to take things (are we likely to see things as bizarre as guys with cabbage growing out of their head, for example?) and I for one feel somewhat excited to find out.  If you haven’t yet given this one a shot, I highly encourage it.  Fortunately, ABC is offering Internet streams of Carpoolers, as well as many other programs, here.

So that’s my take on Carpoolers, so far.  Now you!