'The League' takes a pass at depicting the world of fantasy football

Speaking of football, a new comedy on FX depicts a group of friends who may be as sports-obsessed as the most loyal Dillon boosters on "Friday Night Lights."

I'd been looking forward to The Leagueâ€' (9:30 p.m. Central Thursday, FX; one star) which is set in Chicago and depicts the antics of a group of men in a fantasy football league.  My husband has been playing fantasy football for a decade and I could only imagine the humor to be mined from the obsession with stats and the delicious torture of picking the right roster of players each week.

But instead of heated conversations about minor rule changes or the amusing depiction of draft rituals, The Leagueâ€' offers jokes about pornography and humorless wives (ha ha!). I wasn't really prepared for a show this aggressively raunchy. And if I wanted jokes about shrill wives who deny their husbands sex or act inappropriately in unrealistic ways, I could have watched a lame traditional sitcom.

Unfortunately the male characters  on the show are almost as one-dimensional. All in all, it would be easier to give the macho, frat-house vibe a pass if the jokes were funny, but much of the humor in the first two episodes falls flat.

As for the cast, the most effective performer is Paul Scheer, who plays a wealthy doctor who clearly hasn't studied his fantasy football magazines well enough. And Nick Kroll has a funny scene in which his character grills the neighborhood fantasy-football savant -- a young boy with encyclopedic knowledge of gridiron stats.

Still, not much about this show rang true to me, except the moment when the league commissioner begged players to get their fees in on time.