REVIEWED - SPANGLISH: James L. Brooks, the director of Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, made his name writing, and creating, some of the finest situation comedies ever to grace US television. Series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi carried the imprint of a generous, intelligent - and sometimes overly sentimental - creative imagination.

Spanglish, a liberal guilt-trip dressed up as a comedy of manners, could, if it were better cast and considerably less sluggish, be the pilot for a decent Brooks series. The story - or, rather, the situation - concerns the relationship between a middle-class family and the live-in servants.

Deborah (Téa Leoni), a stereotypically neurotic LA homemaker, hires hardworking, upstanding Flor (Paz Vega) as her housekeeper, despite the fact that the pulchritudinous Mexican speaks no English. When Deborah and her husband (Adam Sandler), "the best chef in America", decide to summer in Malibu, they bring along Flor and her daughter - who, being a second-generation immigrant, speaks English beautifully - to chop the vegetables, polish the silver and make everybody feel slightly uncomfortable.

As sitcoms should and films shouldn't, Spanglish just sits idly on the screen without moving anywhere. The relationships are established early on and, though there is a bit of romantic fondling between the charismatic Vega and the faintly sinister Sandler, nobody seems interested in furthering the action.

This would be bearable if the characters were anything other than mannequins, crafted to represent certain positions in the contemporary class struggle, and the overall tone were not so infused with the moral nausea that overly sensitive Californian liberals must feel every time some Juan or Juanita refills their water glass.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show is currently available on Region 1 DVD.