'Barbershop' When: 10 tonight on Showtime. Starring: Omar Gooding. 'Tommy Lee Goes to College' When: 9 p.m. Tuesday on NBC. Starring: Tommy Lee.

Revisit the "Barbershop" or watch a rocker try to cut it in college? Viewers wanting their funny bone tickled can do both this week as two new comedy series kick off. Prepare to be shocked: Neither one is totally terrible.

'Barbershop: The Series'

Showtime's new show based on the movies is actually pretty funny. Pretty profane, too, but still funny, and a better-realized weekly program than last week's Showtime comedy premiere, "Weeds."

Calvin (Omar Gooding, filling the role played by Ice Cube in the movies) continues to run his Chicago neighborhood barbershop, a place populated by joke-cracking characters, including quick-tempered Terri (Toni Trucks, replacing Eve), veteran barber Eddie (Barry Shabaka Henley, replacing Cedric the Entertainer), Nigerian immigrant Yinka (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and the sole Caucasian barber, Isaac (John Wesley Chatham).

I never saw the "Barbershop" films, so I can't compare the TV actors to the movie actors who played these roles first. But judging the show on its own merits, the standout in the pilot is Trucks, a volatile, tiny woman who's only too happy to fly off the handle without much notice. Full of energy and fully committed to the character, Trucks doesn't play Terri so much as she becomes Terri.

Some of the films' snappy, topical humor remains intact, but there's not as much of it in the premiere as you might expect.

"I say Michael Jackson is racist because he only [has sex with] little white boys," Eddie suggests, begging for a fight. "What do you think about that, Calvin?"

In tonight's premiere, poor Calvin just wants to get through the day. His wife is on him to hire a distant relative, recently paroled Romadal (Dan White), and Yinka needs lessons in dirty talk after his attempts to woo the ladies come off as overly clinical -- masterfully so -- but still too graphic to print in a family newspaper.

Written and directed by executive producer John Ridley ("Platinum," "Third Watch"), the first episode of "Barbershop" (10 tonight) is funny, but not uproarious, perhaps because Ridley has to establish the characters for viewers who never watched the movies.

'Tommy Lee Goes to College'

Though ostensibly a reality show, NBC's "Tommy Lee Goes to College" (9 p.m. Tuesday) is the best evidence yet of the amount of scripting that goes into many shows in this genre. Complete with a stuffed shirt-sounding narrator -- to emphasize and stereotype the world of academia -- "Tommy Lee" features sound effects and plot contrivances that make it clear producers went in with an agenda. There's even a disclaimer at the end of each episode: "Some elements have been produced and/or edited for comedy."

That said, the show is a lot of fun as it traffics in the same reality-as-sitcom sub-genre as "The Simple Life." But "Tommy Lee" is not nearly as mean-spirited.

Lee, who formed Motley Crue at age 19 and went on to gain Internet porn fame for the widely-circulated home video of Lee having sex with former wife Pamela Anderson, attends classes (he's not enrolled) at The University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

In the first of two episodes airing back-to-back Tuesday, Lee auditions roommates, attends classes and gets the hots for his co-ed tutor, Natalie, clearly picked to distract Tommy. She says he's "kind of like a little kid," which is true. Lee seems genuinely nervous around authority figures.

"It's a beautiful campus," Lee tells the school's chancellor.

"Well, we think so," the chancellor replies. "Don't trash it."

Lee is thrown into the academic deep end (organic chemistry for a college newbie?) and his mantra soon becomes, "Please don't call on me, please don't call on me."

He also tries out for the marching band and quickly discovers it's harder than he expects, even for a notorious rocker.

"I was up at 5:30 or 6 [a.m.]," he complains of the band practice start time. "Normally I wouldn't get up that early, even for sex."