WEEKEND TV : GOING TO THE MAT IN ‘FATHERS’ OPENER

It’s difficult to take seriously the professed sensitivity of a new series about children when the first episode tries to hook viewers by opening at a professional wrestling match.

Indeed, “Fathers and Sons,” which begins a five-week tryout on NBC Sunday (7 p.m., Channels 4, 36 and 39), bears about as much resemblance to reality as professional wrestling does to athletics. If only it were as funny as professional wrestling.

Not to be confused with the novel by Ivan Turgenev, this “Fathers and Sons” centers around four pre-teen boys and one of their dads, played by Merlin Olsen, who, like Ozzie Nelson, evidently will always be around to help--as in Sunday’s episode, in which the friends decide to go out for their school’s wrestling team and Dad is there as the volunteer assistant coach.

So why does the title refer to “Fathers,” plural? Evidently another Dad will figure in later stories, but there’s no mention of him in the first one. Which is only one of the confusing aspects of this series.

Writer Nick Arnold and producer-director Michael Zinberg fail to establish a consistent attitude: one moment they’ve got the laugh track chuckling at how Olsen is deliberately deceived by his son (Jason Late), then a short time later they want us to believe that one of the boys is so attuned to the needs of a handicapped friend that he can say to Olsen with a straight face, “If we let Evan turn his back on the wrestling team, who knows what he’s gonna turn his back on next?”

On this lame enterprise, if he’s got any sense.