Seth Green

Not all traditions are worth maintaining.

Seth Green, left, Todd Grinnell, Josh Cooke and Shane McRae play four friends who share an apartment in Four Kings.

On the plus side, NBC revives one of its best traditions: the four-comedy, reality-free Thursday block that viewers counted on for 20 years.

Unfortunately, the network has also fallen back on one of its worst traditions: filling the off-hours with subpar shows from producers of their hits. That bad habit gave us such gems as Veronica’s Closet and Good Morning, Miami. And it now brings us Four Kings, which, like Miami, is an inferior product from Will & Grace producers David Kohan and Max Mutchnick.

With Kings, the producers follow their sitcom pattern, stressing jokes over character and nonsense over common sense. On Will, that often leads to unexpected twists and big laughs, but a show with that approach needs to be very funny very often, because it can’t fall back upon our fondness for the characters. And it doesn’t hurt to have four stars who can push the material along when it falters.

Four Kings

NBC, Thursday, 8:30 p.m. ET/PT

* * out of four

Let’s just say Kings is not as lucky in either its writing or its casting.

The premise is a stretch, even for sitcoms. The titular kings are four guys who have been so close since grade school they’ve never spent a birthday apart. So like all super-close friends, they decide to share a fabulous New York apartment, which admittedly will simplify all that birthday party planning.

The apartment belongs to Ben (Josh Cooke), who inherited it from his grandmother. He decides to fill his new home with friends: Barry (Seth Green), who is bitter, neurotic and jealous of Ben’s perfect life; Jason (Todd Grinnell), who used to be fat and may someday be gay; and Bobby (Shane McRae), who is the resident underachieving dope.

In short, it’s a good thing they’ve been friends since childhood, because nothing in their personalities would lead you to believe they’d even be civil to each other if they met as adults. That’s a problem for a sitcom about friendship.

Green is a highly skilled and incredibly distinctive comic actor, and Cooke is likable as the laid-back lead. But the problem is that Green’s character is right: Everything is "all about Ben," and that focus isn’t supportable. If the show is going to work, the characters around Ben have to be more than one-note jokes trapped in the middle of silly, contrived stories.

We can only hope that Kohan and Mutchnick have another show in them to match Will. But we haven’t seen it yet, and it’s possible we never will. That, I’m sorry to say, is another TV tradition.