Not “Miss Guided,” yet not all that clever, either

ABC’s “Miss Guided” would likely benefit from being paired with its fall hit “Samantha Who?”, yet that’s not how it’s getting scheduled. Both feature winning performances from their female leads; both have over-the-top moments. Like “Samantha Who?” (and every other show on ABC’s schedule), it will likely benefit greatly from its “Dancing with the Stars” lead-in tonight. Alas, hereafter, it won’t have “DWTS” to protect it.

“Miss Guided” is more cartoonish than “Samantha,” rarely bothering to venture a toe into the icy pool of the real world. Judy Greer emerges as the Amy Adams (“Enchanted”) of the small screen as the perpetually perky if constantly clueless Becky Freeley, who survived the traumas of her gawky high-school years to return to said school as its guidance counselor. Like Alexandra Wentworth’s misnamed Dr. Goode on Starz’s “Head Case,” she tends to myopically offer students advice based on wherever her head might be at any given moment.

The school where she toils has decidedly clocked out from the laborious efforts of improving its pupils’ lives: The principal (Earl Billings) is burned out and lazy; the assistant principal (Chris Parnell) is officiously ineffectual and passive-aggressive; the English teacher (Brooke Burns), a former and far more popular classmate of Becky’s, is vainly self-entitled, expecting every man who crosses her path to be smitten with her (she tends to get her way on that one); and the Spanish teacher (Kristoffer Polaha), on whom Becky’s hopelessly sweet, is earnest and kind but not terribly bright – he doesn’t actually know much Spanish. Documentary-style interview sequences are inserted, a la “The Office,” though these feel awkward given that the rest of the show doesn’t exude a similar non-fiction feel.

There’s a nifty little comedy about our crumbling educational system in here, somewhere, if the producers weren’t so busy trying to meet-cute with viewers. Imagine a sitcom about our impending financial crisis reaching fruition with a bunch of zany characters doing wacky things yet scarcely suffering in cardboard boxes under a freeway overpass, and that’s the sane sensibility you have here.

Though tonight’s episode is broadly cartoonish, the first episode this Thursday (when it lands in its regular timeslot, offering two episodes back-to-back) is more assured and amusing. Ashton Kutcher (one of the show’s executive producers) guest-stars as an itinerant Spanish substitute teacher whose faux-real-world experience wows everyone except Becky. Though he tries, pretentiously, to woo her with his multilingual pretensions: He tells her her name – we’re talking “Becky” here – is not just “beautiful,” but “tres Jolie.”

But, still – a show this modest resorting to stunt-casting in its second episode aired (it was actually shot later in the season, suggesting that the others before it aren’t this good, which ain’t all that promising) doesn’t portend good things. But producers should keep Greer on their radar if “Miss Guided” doesn’t succeed; she more than proves she can be funny, winning, goofy, endearing – any word that’s on networks’ current buzzwords for cool, that’s what Greer can do.

- “Miss Guided:” 10:30 tonight; hereafter, 8 and 8:30 p.m. Thursdays, ABC Channel 7.