Click & Clack & ... Clank

Even if you'd be shocked to learn that there are still cars with sticks left on the road - and even if you don't even know what that means - you'd still no doubt enjoy listening to Click & Clack's "Car Talk" show on NPR. Tom and Ray Magliozzi are auto enthusiasts nonpareil with thick Boston accents who offer callers incredibly perceptive-sounding diagnoses on whatever's ailing their cars, be it a '72 Chevy Vega or the latest Toyota Prius, and do so with an infectious sense of humor, even if they're violating the first rule of comedy which stipulates: Never Laugh at Your Own Jokes.

So let's look under the hood of their new animated PBS series, "As the Wrench Turns," and see what's gone wrong, shall we?

Ah, this is easier to diagnose than a worn-out fan belt on a '68 Mustang: Click & Clack's new show suffers from not enough Click & Clack. They're but bit players in their own show, resigned to the backseat as less interesting characters are allowed to take the wheel.

"As the Wrench Turns" features Click & Clack as PBS entrenchments who also run their own garage with a predictable stable of sidekicks. It's a bad sign when the opening-credit sequence ends like almost every bad '70s animated series did, with the cast meta-laughing at a lame joke.

In Wednesday's debut episode, Click & Clack are not holding up their end in raising funds for the latest in PBS's many pledge drives, and so, their show is in jeopardy. (The jabs at PBS, which could've been inspired, are instead wan, predictable stuff about pledge-drive tote bags and coffee mugs.) So, their friends decide, through logic that I injected into my PlotGenerator10X.1.23.googol and nearly blew the thing up, that they should run for President - their matching funds will create enough for PBS's coffers, and allow them to chatter away another day.

Except that they make for lousy communicators-in-chief. Whether the issue is health care or immigration, they abandon the talking points they've been issued and twist it into a blinkered metaphor for cars, confusing the voting populace and despairing their handlers. But they achieve a smidgen of traction with voters when they declare, "Mechanics make mistakes. But unlike politicians, we have to fix our mistakes."

But what utterly undoes what's supposed to pass for humor on the show is its horribly dated references. A James Carville doppelganger turns up to manage Click & Clack's campaign - and that's the hippest reference the episode can manage. When Click & Clack appear at a debate, they're pitted against not-terribly-funny parodies of Nixon and Kennedy. Yes - in 2008, one show has the bold temerity to parody politics from a half-century back.

We can't wait for next week's episode, an eviscerating satire of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. What a car wreck.

-- "Click & Clack's As the Wrench Turns:" 8 tonight, PBS (KCET Channel 28).