If Father Doesn’t Know Best, He’s Willing to Learn

As people on the street line up to high-five Henry and tell him how much they’ve missed him, and as his family members tell the camera what a great guy he is, you recognize the problem. The show is more concerned with making Henry a saint than it is with making him funny.

Since Mr. Fox revealed in 1999 that he had Parkinson’s and left his starring role in “Spin City,” he has made a series of prominent guest appearances, notably as the lawyer Louis Canning on “The Good Wife.” On that show the writers, and Mr. Fox, were resolutely unsentimental: Canning was a manipulative shark who used his condition (identified as dyskinesia) to play on the sympathies of judges and jurors. Sometimes he failed, and we laughed, perhaps uncomfortably, at his disbelief and chagrin.

Very little that Mr. Fox, or anyone else, does in “The Michael J. Fox Show,” which starts on Thursday night, will force you to laugh. Everything about his return to sitcom stardom is mild, tucked in, determined not to offend. The main characters are blandly likable and one-note: patient (Henry’s wife), man hungry (his sister-in-law), swinging (his boss).

The squabbling but happy family with three children, one of them much younger than the other two, will remind viewers of a certain age of another NBC sitcom starring Mr. Fox, the 1980s hit “Family Ties.” And like the Keatons in “Family Ties,” the Henrys have suburban souls, even if they live in a New York City apartment. What other Manhattan residents go to a Times Square video arcade for a family outing?

That throwback quality isn’t the show’s downfall, though. The problem is the feeling that you’re watching a long and expensive public service announcement. The message would seem to be that people with Parkinson’s are just like anyone else, except, of course, that Mike Henry isn’t.

Created by Will Gluck, director of the film “Easy A,” and Sam Laybourne, a “Cougar Town” writer, “The Michael J. Fox Show” plays a double game with Mr. Fox’s condition. Jokes are made about it, and they’re among the better lines — Henry’s wife, hearing he hasn’t taken his medication before going to bed, says, “Good, then I won’t have to do all the work.” Slapstick scenes involving Mr. Fox’s shakiness — Henry struggling to open a jar or trying to dodge a hovering balloon — are the only moments viewers are likely to remember five minutes after the show ends.

But the jokes are never really transgressive, and they don’t build to anything. They’re affirmations of Henry’s determination or manliness, or demonstrations of what a good sport he is. And a bromide is always looming on the horizon, like Henry’s declaration to the camera in Episode 2 that family members are “the ones who challenge you, support you and love you, no matter what.” (The show is an unacknowledged mockumentary in the style of “Modern Family.”)

The cast members are all better than their material, beginning with Mr. Fox, whose gift for sarcasm is still intact. (When Henry is told that a poem he just belittled was written by Maya Angelou, Mr. Fox nails the throwaway response: “Oh, now that I hear her voice, it’s breathtaking.”)

Wendell Pierce, so wonderful in “The Wire” and “Treme,” and Betsy Brandt, underappreciated in “Breaking Bad,” make the most of their hackneyed roles. Mr. Pierce’s smooth-talking network executive seems to have stepped out of a 1960s Playboy Club while Ms. Brandt’s wife, exasperated but amused, harks back to Suzanne Pleshette on “The Bob Newhart Show.” In the pilot the two are revealed to have schemed to get Henry back to work, a process that requires multiple scenes at various NBC studios and cameos by the “Today” cast.

A later (so far unscheduled) episode shows more promise, with Anne Heche joining the cast and applying her genial nastiness to anti-Fox zingers like: “Are you sitting? I couldn’t tell.” A scene in which Henry’s college-dropout son (Conor Romero) interviews interns for his still-nonexistent tech start-up with the help of his much younger brother (Jack Gore) taps into the vein of classic family-sitcom humor that’s absent in the initial episodes.

From “Family Ties” to “The Secret of My Success” to his recent roles in “The Good Wife” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Mr. Fox has excelled in the role of the smart aleck with a heart of gold. If “The Michael J. Fox Show,” of which he is an executive producer, is going to make an impression, it needs to get smarter fast.