Reba McEntire deserves better than blah NBC sitcom 'Happy's Place': Review

I so desperately want to be happy that Reba McEntire is back on network TV.

The country singer and actress anchored one of the most enjoyable sitcoms of the 2000s with "Reba,"about a single mom who works too hard, loves her kids and never stops. The WB show ran for six seasons and 125 episodes, with its dysfunctional but lovable Hart family at the heart of every story Reba and co-stars Melissa Peterman, JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Steve Howey and Christopher Rich told.

So you would think that a new sitcom starring McEntire and Peterman set in a Tennessee bar (hello, "Cheers" aspirations) and with another very dysfunctional family dynamic would be a guarantee of another "Reba"-style good time. Alas, NBC's "Happy's Place" (Fridays, 8 EDT/PDT, ★★ out of four) is no "Reba." It's just another low-rent sitcom with stale jokes, bland characters and a limp plot. It's not so much that it's bad, it's just so boring, banal and blah. And that is simply not good enough for the likes of three-time Grammy winner McEntire, 69. She deserves scripts that sing just as well as she does.

As the series opens, Bobbie (McEntire) has inherited the Happy's Place tavern from her late father. The two were close, but after his death, she gets to run the bar the way she wants to with its quirky staff (including Peterman as the overly familiar waitress Gabby) and Tennessee coffee, aka whiskey.

But Bobbie's world is shaken by the sudden appearance of young Isabella (Belissa Escobedo), Bobbie's half-sister, and thus co-owner of Happy's. After a blink and a legal document, Isabella is now working at the bar, and Bobbie is forced to listen to words like "bussin'" and accept input from this walking evidence of her father's infidelity. Meanwhile, Isabella is a fish out of water amid the Southern accents and standoffish attitudes as she tries to find a place for herself. We know she wants to literally "find a place" at Happy's Place because she repeats it several times. (This show is anything but subtle.)