They Want Your Body

Nick Offerman's deadpanning misfit redeems Comedy Central's new workplace sitcom.

Pictured: Jill Bartlett, John DiResta, Peter Hulne, Nick Offerman, Tim Nichols and Frank Merino.

“American Body Shop,” a new Comedy Central sitcom (debuting 10:30 p.m. Sunday July 8) that works off the mold of “Reno: 911” and more recently, the inferior “Halfway Home” is largely saved from what could have been just another “Reno” knock-off by the deadpan performance of Nick Offerman as an auto technician who regularly throws out quite unexpectedly refined vocabulary.

The combination of the dialogue and Offerman’s delivery really make this show worth watching, even though most of the other elements are pro forma and derivative. The lone female lead in “Body Shop,” Jill Bartlett, only does the same “smarter than all the troglodyte guys act,” but without as much wit as Andrea Savage did in the late, lamented Comedy Central show, “Dog Bites Man.”

Anyway, just a few instances of Offerman’s surprising lines from the first couple episodes -- after strapping a co-worker under an SUV to check out a vehicle in some misguided road test, he recounts that child labor laws keep him from using small children for this task, and “midgets are too expensive.” Somehow this bit of material, bound to offend that group, doesn’t come off as badly as some of the cracks about Mexicans and others at other points in the series.

In the episode “The Bishop and the Pawn,” Offerman gets another great line in the middle of its plot about one of the mechanics being blackmailed into helping a bishop dispose of his hit and run victim -- “you transported the decedent to the location.”

It’s questionable whether “American Body Shop” will succeed where the other aforementioned series failed, but at least it’s cohesive, if only because the characters are all of a similar type, rather than the “throw together one of every ethnicity” approach of “Halfway Home” that inevitably makes the stories more artificial and less possible. One can only hope further episodes beyond the two screened for critics continue to showcase Offerman.