'The Tony Rock Project,' premiering Wednesday on MyNetworkTV

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - Launched in 2006 as an all-telenovela network, low ratings have reduced MyNetworkTV to a wasteland of beat-them-bloody extreme sports and tawdry reality shows. So give credit to "The Tony Rock Project," the comic revue that debuts Wednesday _ at least it's aimed at viewers whose age and IQ total more than the price of a gallon of gas.

Unhappily notable is the absence of the word "successfully" in that last sentence. It's cheap in every sense of the word _ producers appear to have spared no expense on "The Tony Rock Project" as long it was $1.98 or less, and the jokes were apparently much less. Fat-ladies-exercising video? Gary-Coleman-is-short gags? Jeez, why not just put up a stop sign in a polio ward and be done with it?

Tony Rock, the younger brother of comedian Chris, stars in the show's longest and least funny bits, skits that I can only assume were produced during the Hollywood writers' strike earlier this year _ surely nobody got paid to write this stuff.

The rest of "The Tony Rock Project" consists of hidden-camera bits, many of them aimed at pushing buttons on race and gender. A few of these actually hit the mark, including one in which an unsuspecting consumer focus group is asked what they think of prospective ads for a new breakfast cereal, each more preposterous inflammatory than the last: Asians eating it with chopsticks, a black family eating it with a police car clearly visible out the window, and so on.

The last one shows an enormous Latino family gathered around the breakfast table. "So you mean we multiply like rats?" asks an incredulous Hispanic member of the focus group. "At least there's no cop car in that one," a black member tells her comfortingly. Aha! American progress!

Later, though, after another prospective ad shows a bosomy, half-naked model writhing lasciviously on the ground after a bite of a burger, the focus group is asked if the commercial would make them visit the restaurant. The male hands all shoot up in unison.

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THE TONY ROCK PROJECT

8-8:30 p.m. EDT Wednesday

MyNetworkTV

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© 2008, The Miami Herald.