<table> </table> Sam is having a bad week. In fact, you could say he&#8217;s having his worst week since the last time he went to visit his prospective in-laws and accidentally torched their house.</p><p>Well, the show is called &#8220;Worst Week,&#8221; after all, and as you might guess, Sam&#8217;s fortunes aren&#8217;t going to get any better next week, either. It will be hard to top what we see in the first half-hour of Monday night&#8217;s pilot, though &#8212; comically bad driving and ill-timed phone calls and impolitic utterances and people stepping in the wrong place at the wrong time and even a man mistaken for a corpse.</p><p>&#8220;Worst Week&#8221; is Rube Goldberg meets Murphy&#8217;s Law meets the parents. And it&#8217;s hysterical.</p><p>After I was done splitting my sides, though, I had a question for this bright new comedy on CBS: How can things possibly be this bad &#8212; I mean good &#8212; next week?</p><p>I suppose we can leave that question for later. For now, this is a pretty ambitious effort by the one network that has managed to keep the traditional situation comedy alive on Monday nights by not taking too many chances.</p><p>&#8220;Worst Week,&#8221; in that sense, is a huge roll of the dice for CBS. It has no studio audience. It doesn&#8217;t have many jokey-joke punchlines. And the humor builds up, so that the viewer&#8217;s 22 minutes of undivided attention is required for the full effect. That&#8217;s a quality &#8220;Worst Week&#8221; has in common with TV&#8217;s classic sitcoms, especially &#8220;Seinfeld,&#8221; which has been gone for a decade now.</p><p>As the show begins, Sam &#8212; played by Kyle Bornheimer &#8212; is talking with his pretty girlfriend, Melanie (Erinn Hayes), about their plan for that evening, when they are going to spring the news on her folks that they are expecting a baby.</p><p>The details of Sam&#8217;s last visit to her parents unfold amusingly. Seems everyone but him went out one night, so he decided to &#8220;surprise&#8221; them with a fire in the fireplace &#8230; and that&#8217;s when the family dog, thinking the strange man meant his masters harm, attacked.</p><p>Defending his actions once more, Sam says, &#8220;I&#8217;ll ask again: Wouldn&#8217;t you like to have come home to a blazing fire that night?&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;We did,&#8221; responds Melanie, dryly.</p><p>Going forward, &#8220;Worst Week&#8221; faces a couple of challenges: re-creating the pilot&#8217;s slow-motion train wreck again and again, and plausibly (or with ironic unreality) allowing Sam to make it up over and over to Melanie and her folks, played by Kurtwood Smith (Red on &#8220;That &#8217;70s Show&#8221;) and Nancy Lenehan.</p><p>I don&#8217;t know if they can pull it off, but I&#8217;m sure willing to watch them try.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">&#8216;WORST WEEK&#8217; </span></strong><br /> <strong>Premieres: </strong>8:30 p.m. Monday on CBS (KCTV-5)</p><p></div>