Three sitcoms airing early each week are among the new TV offerings doing relatively well:

"How I Met Your Mother" (7:30 p.m. Monday, WBBM-Ch. 2), "Out of Practice" (8:30 p.m. Monday, WBBM-Ch. 2) and "My Name Is Earl" (8 p.m. Tuesday, WMAQ-Ch. 5).

None of these middling entries in genre imitation is likely to wind up a classic. They’re intermittently amusing, they pleasantly amble instead of hilariously rush, and each can be annoying.

Nevertheless, a holding pattern for the endangered sitcom is better than a crash. And in their different setups and sensibilities, they tell us about the American comic landscape, at least as Hollywood views it. Urbane angst ("Friends" and "Frasier") and casuistry are in; working-class pugnacity ("Everybody Loves Raymond," "The King of Queens") is on the wane.

"How I Met Your Mother" pours the "Friends" potion into a bottle and uncorks an only slightly altered liqueur: a twentysomething quintet made up of two bachelors, a bachelorette and an engaged couple behaving as if still on the make.

"Out of Practice" focuses on the only member of an urban family who isn’t a physician. That he’s seen as substandard, though a college graduate, signals the educational bias here. Both shows are set in the cozy, coffeeshop milieu of "Seinfeld" New York.

By contrast, "Earl" is about a petty thief who moves from a mobile home to a motel when his marriage explodes. It isn’t really lower-class or rural, either, but an echo of the cartoon condescension aimed at the trailer set by such antecedents as "Raising Arizona" and, for that matter, "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Earl lives in an unnamed small town where gay men have to be nudged to come out by macho straight bumpkins such as Earl: a mythic village that’s a distant memory, if it ever existed. Gaze on the setting’s relentless sunlight and desert foliage, and you’re likely to think Southern California, not Mayberry.

But all three are coasting on laughs that sometimes tweak, mock and upend the urban cultural bias they otherwise embody. Ben, the underachiever on "Practice," is the only non-cartoon: His brother’s a plastic surgeon Lothario, his sister’s a badly dressed lesbian, his father is an emasculated metrosexual (Henry Winkler) and his mother (Stockard Channing) is a cardiologist who’s an often heartless blend of Maude and Phyllis.

When she lists her daughter’s many ex-lovers, her daughter replies, "I’m touched that you remember them." "The question is, dear," Channing retorts, "Do you?"

Ben’s wife (who just left him) is described as a "tree hugger" and self-righteous vegan unmissed by her in-laws. In these culture wars, it’s open season on blue- and red-state targets alike.

A recent "Mother," meanwhile, effectively put down an urban mecca dating back decades: the loud, crowded, impossible-to-get-into disco. They all get in, only to find its exclusiveness empty, unable to hear each other the rest of the show, still shouting in the cab ride home.

Of the lot, "Mother" seems the most derivative, a G-rated "Sex and the City." Its one novelty — it’s told in flashback by a man to his kids in the future — is already a pointless gimmick. Neil Patrick Harris, hailed as the new Frasier, is a synthetic echo, while Alyson Hannigan, the "American Pie" band camper, is oddly bland. The players on "Practice" are more promising, including Christopher Gorham’s Ben, cute and puppylike, just as the role requires.

But "Earl," a descendant of "Scrubs" and "Arrested Development," is the most endearing, as carefree as the independent films it evokes. (Jason Lee, who’s Earl, dates to "Chasing Amy," and even guests, such as Giovanni Ribisi, tend to share that indie background.)

Though Earl’s brother is so ludicrously dim he makes Joey Tribiani look like a human genome expert, the show does boast Jaime Pressly’s funny, headstrong performance as Earl’s greedy ex-wife. Unlikely topics include U.S. immigration. While trying to teach English to a classroom of would-be citizens, Earl exclaims, "No wonder teachers make so much money."

Like the merlot milieu send-ups of "Practice," a recent "Earl" episode sided with the scruffs as it mocked the goody-goody and middlebrow via a woman addicted to picnics, baby talk and papier-mache crafts.

"Earl" also reaches the furthest back in lore — and deepest into the soul — for its theme. Earl, winner of $100,000 in a lottery, is on a mission to make up for past evil. A bad man turning good is perennially relevant, fuel for everything from "King Lear" and "A Christmas Carol" to "Jerry Maguire."

Indeed, the possibilities for Earl’s weekly redemption are only as limited as our capacity to rob, lie or seduce. Better still, cupidity and avarice cross all ethnic, geographic and class boundaries. Nothing beats the human condition at blurring our biases or making us smile.