“Ghosted,” with Adam Scott.
Max Jennifer is a true believer in life on other planets. Now if only he could get a life on his own planet, where he has been waiting for his wife to come back home.
She was abducted by aliens, you see.
Max (Adam Scott) and Leroy (Craig Robinson), a former LAPD cop who’s now a mall cop, are recruited by a secret government organization called the Bureau Underground to rescue a guy who’s been “Ghosted,” in the delightfully loopy Fox comedy of the same name premiering on Sunday, Oct. 1.
The series is one of the brighter lights in the comedy field this fall, but more importantly, it shows that you can make a crazy idea work if you have the right cast, writer and director on the same page.
The single-camera sitcom is directed by Jonathan Krisel, who brings appropriate experience, writing and directing “Portlandia” and “Tim and Eric Awesome Show” on Adult Swim.
Max and Leroy don’t know each other when they are separately zapped unconscious, thrown into the back of a van and transported to the super-secret headquarters of Bureau Underground. They were chosen for a single mission to rescue a secret agent who has been abducted by mysterious forces. Turns out, the agent actually believes Max’s theory of multiple universes. Max wrote a book on the subject when he was teaching at Stanford, before his life and career crumbled and he ended up working in a bookstore.
The Bureau is run by the no-nonsense Captain Ava Lafrey (Ally Walker) with the assistance of Barry (Adeel Akhtar), a kind of Marty Feldman type.
The script is loose, chatty and casual, but it’s the chemistry between Scott and Robinson that seals the deal on the comedy. The plot is only minimally important, at least in the pilot episode. It does what a first episode should do, which is to establish the situation. But more importantly, we get a taste of how well Scott and Robinson play off each other, like a modern-day Laurel and Hardy. That gives it more than a ghost of a chance of working well in the Fox Sunday night lineup. David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV