Fox’s new sitcom Happy Hour (Thursday nights at 8:30 EDT) is a real guilty pleasure—a show about moral chaos with surprising humor and cleverness.

Happy Hour follows the misadventures of a small-town Missouri sad sack who moves in with a would-be suave, Rat Pack bachelor in a very ordinary Chicago apartment. As in ABC’s comedy-drama Men in Trees, the women want their men to have an impossible combination of contradictory qualities, looking for a perfectly sensitive, thoughtful . . . Tarzan.

And the men want, well, the women. It’s a situation with a good deal of humor in it—though probably not so funny to have to live it.

The cast is excellent, especially Beth Lacke, who is quite simply the funniest woman on television today. The show is worth watching if only to see what she’ll say or do next.

Any program that comes out in favor of the 4 p.m. martini is all right by me, and the characters’ unabashed and frequently unhinged pursuit of the good life in our modern-day mismash of conflicting values is truly comic and highly enlightening.

This is one I’ll watch again.