Daddy Dearest.

Frasier, a CBS spinoff of Cheers starring Kelsey Grammer, is the most hopeful entry of the new TV season and indeed a model of entertainment television at its best: devoid of serious social content, politically indifferent, and hilarious. The storyline of the premiere episode, which will have aired September 16, is almost exactly that of a new Fox comedy starring Don Rickles, Daddy Dearest, a show exhibiting the traits of TV at its worst.

Both shows begin with a family breakup. Dr. Frasier Crane has moved to Seattle, his old hornetown, to start afresh, leaving behind an unfaithful nag of a wife and his old Cheers buddies. There he finds solace in the quiet life and in a new job as talk-show psychologist. "My wife had just left me," he confides to a caller, "which was very painful. Then she came back to me, which was excruciating." An obvious enough line, but you have to imagine Gramreefs perfect delivery as the sophisticated, anguished, high-strung buffoon.

The reason Frasier will last a while is simple. The character himself is funny. Put Frasier in almost any situation and some annoyance or humiliation awaits him, in the way one felt a laugh coming the moment Ted Knight as Ted Baxter or Jack Benny as himself walked into a room. The scene with his father moving in, hauling his ratty old armchair into Frasier's finely appointed apartment-arguing that it fits the "eclectic" theme is priceless.

Daddy Dearest, by contrast, rivals Roseanne and Married... with Children in its sheer, unrelieved vulgarity. Unless I am mistaken, even the studio audience sounds a little stunned by the complete absence of wit or of a single endearing character.

Whether Rickles still keeps 'era rolling in the aisles at Vegas casinos, I have no idea, but his loud-mouth insults routine does not hold up in a sitcom, which might explain why he already has three failed ones to his credit, Still less appealing is Richard Lewis as Rickles's neurotic, recently divorced sou, who, when the folks split up, has to take in Dad. And just when! you think these are the two most unbearable people you have ever seen on TV, in walks the mother (Broadway actress Renee Taylor), bellowing her staggeringly tasteless lines about -- what else? her sexual appetites, as if trying to be heard by the

ushers outside the theater door. "Well, okay, there goes my sex life," says her swinger son after hearing one of these. "I guess I just become a priest or something."

Rickles: "That might not be a bad idea. From what I hear they've been getting a lot of action lately."

This sidesplitter, writer and producer Billy Van Zant's idea of witty social commentary, is about as funny as it gets. Lewis's credits include the HBO comedy specials I'm Doomed, I'm in Pain, and I'm Exhausted--which uncannily foretell the vieweFs range of emotions watching this frenzied, embarrassing spectacle.