Anyone who caught the Olympics couldn’t avoid ads for NBC fall shows.

Technically speaking, it’s therefore superfluous to remind you that "Father of the Pride" debuts at 9 tonight and "Hawaii" at 8 p.m. tomorrow. But the commercial bombardment also furnished an important cultural forecast. As NBC gets better and better at marketing new series, the actual content declines accordingly.

"Father of the Pride" looks great on paper. It’s from the makers of "Shrek." The voice actors are among Hollywood’s best, including John Goodman, Cheryl Hines, Carl Reiner and (in the pilot) Lisa Kudrow. Toss in a Siegfried and Roy backdrop, and you’ve got combustibility.

Yet all this potential fizzles into the most familiar and dated of NBC formats, the smirky sexcom. They might just as well have slapped an animal snout mask on David Spade or Sean Hayes and called it a new show.

Nevertheless, I suspect "Father of the Pride" will be a hit for at least two weeks. It’s scheduled at a time when there’s virtually no fresh competition, it’s different by virtue of being a cartoon, and next week it will have a boffo lead-in courtesy of "Last Comic Standing."

These packaging tactics are guaranteed to bring millions of curious viewers to the pilot episode. There, they will be greeted by a series in the throes of an identity crisis.

The set-up imagines the private life of white lions performing in Siegfried and Roy’s famous Las Vegas act. Larry (Goodman), wife Kate (Hines) and Kate’s irascible father, Sarmoti (Reiner), form the nucleus. Periodically, Siegfried (Julian Holloway) and Roy (Dave Herman) drop in to make observations and mess with the animals’ lives.

Like "The Simpsons," "Father of the Pride" aims to lampoon human foibles and get away with saying and doing what real people can’t on network TV.

That’s where the resemblance ends. At its best, "The Simpsons" operates off a broad and informed vision of mankind that skewers everything from politics and show business to individual hypocrisy. Sex is only a small part of that universe.

In "Father of the Pride," sex is nearly everything, and it generates humor of a primitive variety. "It might be 9 o’clock in New York, but here, it’s mountin’ time," announces Larry to Kate after spraying his nipples and belly with whipped cream.

For a show that seeks to subvert, "Father of the Pride" is curiously in thrall to ancient conventions. Kudrow plays a female panda upset because she’s fat, over 30 and single. Reiner’s lion sports with a companion half his age and shouts at the panda, "I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you - your ovaries are turning into concrete. Go home!"

Clearly, "Father of the Pride" is not for kids. But with lines like these, is it really for grown-ups? No - and yes. Alongside tacky jokes and wheezy story lines, "Father of the Pride" flirts with some interesting takes on sexuality. An elephant and a turkey appear to be engaged in closeted inter-species dalliance; Siegfried and Roy indulge in the kind of bickering known to stir the loins.

A bolder, brighter series would seize and pursue these relationships - after all, it’s been over a decade since Smithers made eyes at Mr. Burns. "Father of the Pride" instead is not so much ambiguous as ambivalent.

In short, it wants the laughs without the trouble, which is the opposite of what made "The Simpsons" a cultural force.

Timidity also explains why next week’s episode about Larry’s rising stardom is basically a prolonged commercial for Matt Lauer and "Today." There’s a difference between satirizing and advertising, and "Father of the Pride" proves NBC’s overriding appetite for the latter.

If the animated lions are caricatures of human behavior, they at least are more believable than the human cartoons on "Hawaii."

In past seasons, a series so indifferently executed would have been placed on critics’ "First to be canceled" list. Let’s just update the scenario by saying it’s a prime candidate for soon-to-be-replaced-by-a-reality-show.

"Hawaii" fully deserves the quotes around it. This "CSI" clone features two pairs of detective buddies tooling around in convertibles and powerboats as clips of surfing flash by to remind us we’re in what might just as well be called Aloha-ville.

The show tries to stun with visuals, like a glimpse of decapitated heads in a trunk and more gunfire than a season of "CSI." But it’s hard to ignore the clumsy dialogue, interchangeable characters and thin plot in service to effect rather than logic.

Even the poor actors seem uncertain, though casting is another of the myriad problems. I suspect Michael Biehn, Sharif Atkins, Ivan Sergei and Eric Balfour will be watching "60 Minutes," "Smallville" and "America’s Next Model" on rival networks later this fall.

There are some actual Hawaiians in the cast, though relegated to minor roles. And to be fair, NBC’s apparent discrimination is counterbalanced by the question: Would any self-respecting Pacific Islander really want to be in this dog?