TV REVIEW : Base Humor Overruns Kid Comedy

Let’s do a summer camp comedy! It’ll have bullies and nerds, airheads and athletes, an incredibly stupid camp counselor, sadistic torments and “Married . . . With Children”-type vulgarity. The kids’ll eat it up.

Well, maybe they will. Nickelodeon’s series “Salute Your Shorts,” debuting today with a “sneak peak” at 9 a.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., panders shamelessly to elementary and junior high schoolers. (Its regular schedule, beginning this weekend, will be Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. and Sundays at 11:30 a.m.)

There are endless, graphic flatulence jokes (starting with the show’s title song), budding terrorists intimidating the innocent, the usual dismissal of intelligence as being nerdy unless it can be used for profit, cardboard characters and a general celebration of crudity, stupidity and irrelevance.

All but buried among the cheap shots are moments that seem to belong to a different show: a friendship based on mutual respect between an Anglo boy and an African-American girl; the same boy’s loyalty to a bunkmate.

The cast does as well as it can with what it’s given to do. The show was “inspired” by a book by Tom Hill and Steve Slavkin; Slavkin wrote the script.

Nickelodeon bills itself as “the only network for kids.” Judging from this depressing half hour, maybe it’s time for some competition.