Jonathan Storm: L.A. apartments house the hopes of a sitcom

You can't keep a good man down, and now Jeffrey Tambor's back on TV as good old Uncle Saul, an aging sitcom writer living off residuals, in

Welcome to the Captain,

premiering tonight on CBS3 at 8:30.

The Captain is a huge Los Angeles apartment house. "It's been my home for the past 26 years, through four marriages and 79 episodes of a little TV show called Three's Company," he tells Josh, the newbie who gets the welcome mentioned in the title. Clueless to his total cluelessness, Saul also calls the show "T-Co."

Another aging star, whose personal architecture is almost as impressive as that of El Royale, the looming '20s Spanish/French colonial-revival building that plays El Capitan, also lives there. Her name is Charlene Van Ark, and she's played by . . . Raquel Welch.

"You're familiar with my body of work," she purrs to callow Josh, who's way out of his league in her apartment. And, as is wont to happen at the Captain, word gets out.

"I heard you spent some time in the foxhole with Charlene last night," the resident military man says to Josh in the elevator.

Just pairing Welch, who has a lovely sense of humor about herself, and Tambor, who even brought smiles to NBC's shrill and short-lived Twenty Good Years last TV season, puts a sitcom on the right track.

And that's about where this show sits, on the rails, but with a little journey ahead to get from captain to rear admiral. (This is the sort of show where mention of that Navy rank would never pass without a nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

A handful of other moderately entertaining wackos, including a desk manager (stand-up Al Madrigal) who insists on the English pronunciation of his name, Jesus, and a dim blonde who has trouble pronouncing almost everything, populate the building - also, unfortunately, Josh's womanizing friend (Chris Klein), a poor man's version of the Charlie Sheen character in Two and a Half Men, whose presence drags the show down.

Fran Kranz (and don't feel bad if you've never heard of him) is beautifully cast as an unassuming everyman who can enjoy the follies even from the middle of them.

And, for its ongoing story, Welcome to the Captain supplies him a chipmunk-cute love interest, an acupuncturist (Joanna Garcia, who was Reba McIntyre's daughter, Cheyenne, on her long-running WB/CW sitcom).

As with so many new sitcoms these days, there's no real reason to tune in to Captain, but it's a fine way to finish up the hour as you wait for American Experience to come on PBS.

El Royale would be a good subject for that history show. Hollywood folk including Loretta Young, Clark Gable, George Raft, Nicolas Cage, Uma Thurman and Ben Stiller have lived there, across the street from the Wilshire Country Club ("looks nice through the shrubs," says Jesus, who's unlikely to be invited over to shoot a few holes).

Too bad Welcome to the Captain couldn't have rounded up a few of them.