'Raising Hope' review: an offbeat winner for Fox

Fox programmers' recent decision to shift "American Idol" to Wednesdays and Thursdays (meaning that the results show will go up against the NBC Thursday comedy blockade) when the show returns in January was made for an even better reason: They could.

At the moment, Fox owns Tuesday night the way NBC owned Thursdays during the much-ballyhooed "Must See TV" days of "Seinfeld" and "Friends" in the '90s. In its heyday, "American Idol" was the network's down payment on Tuesday night, but just like adding a hotel to Park Place, Fox has been able to build on that with the ratings powerhouse "Glee" during "Idol's" hiatus.

But let's not overlook the network's other Tuesday winner, the freshman sitcom "Raising Hope," which gets a ratings boost by following "Glee" but, in truth, simply crackles with so much perfection - especially in the show's writing and performances - that it's more than earning its growing fan base.

The series was created by Greg Garcia, who was also responsible for NBC's equally offbeat "My Name Is Earl." "Earl," though, was pretty much a one-joke show, albeit enlivened by great writing and a solid performance by Jason Lee in the title role. (Lee just guest-starred as a washed-up rock star with mountainous Smurf hair in "Burt Rocks" last week.)

What makes "Hope" an even better show than "Earl" is that Garcia has learned to broaden the story lines beyond the basic setup of the new show, which is that young Jimmy Chance (Lucas Neff) has become a single father after a brief encounter with a crazed murderess who was later executed. Gaining custody of his young daughter and changing her name from Princess Beyonce, Jimmy tries to raise the infant in the midst of the exaggerated chaos of his own ne'er-do-well family, which includes Garrett Dillahunt as Burt, Jimmy's pool-cleaner dad; Martha Plimpton as his white-trash mom, Virginia; and Cloris Leachman as Mom's dotty grandmother.

Tonight's episode, slyly titled "Toy Story," provides ample evidence of what's making "Hope" destination TV on Tuesday nights. The story turns on Burt's annual Christmas ritual: snagging whatever toy is destined to be the most coveted item on any parent's Christmas list and selling it for a huge markup. This year, that toy is Baby Sneezes, a doll whose nose runs with green mucus when it's squeezed (mucus refill cartridges sold separately). Meanwhile, Virginia is determined to have Hope chosen to star as the Baby Jesus in the church's living Nativity scene, largely so she can play the Virgin Mary. When the church chooses an Asian family's pudgy 3-year old instead, Virginia sets up a competing Nativity across the street, advertising that her baby Jesus - Hope - will be "to scale." In the end, Baby Sneezes becomes much more than a punning McGuffin as all the lose ends of the plot are neatly and hysterically tied up.

Over the years, a handful of sitcom episodes have achieved a certain immortality among viewers - Lucy and Ethel on the candy assembly line, for example, or "The Mary Tyler Moore Show's" "Chuckles Bites the Dust" ("A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"). There are moments in the "Toy Story" episode of "Raising Hope" that are almost that good.

E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle