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You'll like this if you don't take Manhattan seriously

Sustaining a fair lope, he studies his script for the next episode of "Welcome to New York" and feels the pain (mostly from the Mets’ losing Game 1 the night before).

"This is a great position to be in," he says, happy to be starring in the sitcom that tracks New York City attitudes and folkways in a way no other has since "Seinfeld."

In a sense, the Subway Series his team may lose validates "Welcome to New York," premiering tonight, which argues that anything of value is concentrated in New York. How fitting that New York should be hogging baseball!

Now, you may not buy the grandiose picture New Yorkers have of themselves. Neither does "Welcome to New York" hero Jim Gaffigan, a guileless, beige-attired Hoosier newly arrived in Manhattan to be a TV weathercaster.

Played by actor/comic Gaffigan, himself an Indiana native, Jim encounters an odd sort of welcome - a mix of curiosity, suspicion and Gotham-centric stereotyping.

Hey, what was that wisecrack about going to a tractor pull?

"Indiana’s NOT all farms!" Jim sputters to his boss Marsha Bickner, who hired him from Fort Wayne but is having second thoughts.

"I grew up in the same dull, homogenized suburban hell as the rest of the country!"

To convince anyone, Jim has his work cut out for him.

So has Marsha, played with black-clad Manhattan cool by Christine Baranski. Deeming Jim a "work in progress," she knows her task is to transform this alien soul into some semblance of indigenous.

Of course, the funniest thing about "Welcome to New York" is that most of the humor is at New Yorkers’ expense. (No problem. New Yorkers are used to paying through the nose for everything.)

Consider: In the first episode, the pompous anchor Adrian Spencer (who, hilariously portrayed by Rocky Carroll, is an African American hell-bent on being a WASP) ripped Jim for wearing the same kind of eyeglass frames as his own.

"Why," pressed Adrian, whose glasses are meant to lend him an intellectual air, "do you wear YOURS?"

"To SEE!" Jim replied.

This was the exchange that sold "Cybill" veteran Baranski on returning to series TV when she read the pilot script last winter.

"I just wanted to dismantle the notion of Woody from ‘Cheers,’" says Gaffigan, who landed in Manhattan a decade ago.

"The reality is, we ALL shop at the Gap no matter where we live.

"I wanted to do a show where, instead of the Midwestern guy being a hayseed, maybe the New Yorkers are a little crazy."