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FROM THE NY POST:

HOLD THE PEPPERONI! 'PIZZA PLACE' DOESN'T DELIVER
By MICHELE GREPPI

OUR bottom line on "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place" is: Keep the two guys, and send back the girl and the pizza place.

The two guys - Ryan Reynolds and Richard Ruccolo - are the most affable pair to attempt Guy Sitcomedy since "Friends."

The pizza place is supposed to be the means of support for the guys Berg (Reynolds) and Pete (Ruccolo) while they finish grad school in Boston. But it's really just an excuse to overstock the show with characters who aspire to being colorful and/or cute curmudgeons.

There's a delusional resident customer (David Ogden Stiers) who passes off movie plots as his real life. He'll be more hygienically dressed next week but still not at all funny.

There's Bill (Julius Carry), the pizza parlor owner, whose relationship with the two guys is supposed to be more brotherly than employerly. His bark is worse than his bite.

We're supposed to think the same of the Girl in the title, but our jury's not convinced after previewing two episodes.

Sharon is played by Traylor Howard, who was cast as a more likeable but equally unformed blonde in NBC's short-lived "Boston Common."

Sharon has preceded the two guys, with whom she roomed in college, into the real world. She is only jokingly called a "people person."

She sells chemicals that pollute the environment and endanger species. On the plus side, she lives very well,

But for some reason she does this just upstairs from the two guys scraping by on tips and pepperoni.

Berg, the blithest of these two spirits, supplements his income by testing new products and noting the effects on an ever-present tape recorder.

In an upcoming episode, he'll wear talking marathon-trainer shoes for 26 miles - which is about 23 miles too long. Like "Today" fashion hound Matt Lauer, he names the shoes (Turner and Hooch) but their value as straight men is gone long before he begins quoting them.

Tonight, he's testing an asthma inhaler that proves to have a truth serum in it.

That will complicate his attempts to repair the relationship between Pete, an obsessive-complusive-anal-retentive worrywart, and Melissa (Jennifer Westfeldt), whose resemblance to Sharon ends with appearing to be blonde.

So far, it's Sharon's presence that mucks up an otherwise promising Gen-X odd couple who breeze through some pretty predictable material from a team headed by Danny Jacobson ("Mad About You").

They're like a heterosexual Dharma and Greg.

They make men behaving badly a rather appealing prospect.

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