The Season of the STAND-UPS

By Richard Zoglin

It's the time of year to feel sorry for the TV networks. Each fall, the Big Three manufacture a fresh batch of shows and try to generate some new-season excitement, and each year the job gets tougher. The audience wants something different; critics clamor for "innovation." But how many new concepts are left in a cable-saturated world where viewers have seen everything -- and seen it all over again in reruns? Judging by a fall crop dominated by play-it-safe family sitcoms, not many.

There are always, however, new stars. TV's creative food chain lately has been turned upside down. Producers once dreamed up concepts and then looked for actors to flesh them out. Now, more often, the stars come first and the shows are built around them. It's the season of the star vehicle, the series built to a performer's specifications. What matters is the showcase, not the show.

Vehicles, of course, are as old as television itself. I Love Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore and The Cosby Show were well-designed showpieces for popular performers. But never have stars been so firmly in the driver's seat. Faye Dunaway, making her weekly-TV debut, appears in a made-to-order sitcom this fall. So do such TV veterans as John Larroquette, Valerie Bertinelli, Bronson Pinchot and Kelsey Grammer. Another group of shows has been constructed around performers with no track record, no Q rating, not even (in many cases) any acting experience at all, except on the stand-up comedy stage.

The sudden vogue for stand-up comedians is based on solid Nielsen evidence. First Roseanne and later Seinfeld, Home Improvement and Martin showed that joking at the Improv can be a springboard to prime-time success. Now producers and studio executives are scouring the comedy clubs for the next Tim Allen or Martin Lawrence. "It's a feeding frenzy," says a comedy producer. "A lot of these people you might cast as the second or third lead in an ensemble. But now, the studios want to build shows around them."

For an idea-starved industry, the club comics bring some important assets. Even without acting credentials, they know how to get laughs. Often they have developed a stage persona, or an attitude, or at the very minimum a few well- tested gag lines. Yet delivering one-liners is not the same as creating a character. For every comic who has made a successful transition to prime time, there are others (Jackie Mason, Richard Lewis) who have been sabotaged by their own limitations or by the rickety contraptions built for them.

Thea Vidale, for example, is a big, boisterous comic with a lot of stage presence -- or, at least, presence over a lot of the stage. Unfortunately, her ABC sitcom, Thea, is a throwback to the broad, brackish family sitcoms of the Good Times ilk: streetwise sass drenched in sentimental mush. John Mendoza, who plays a newly divorced sportswriter in NBC's The Second Half, is a mellower, and less accomplished, performer, who is also defeated by tired gag situations -- the inept single guy who can't furnish an apartment or get a date without stumbling over his feet.

Caryl Kristensen and Marilyn Kentz bring more freshness and vitality to NBC's The Mommies. Housewives from Petaluma, California, they began doing a stand-up act three years ago, giving voice to their suburban-mom woes. Now they play next-door neighbors with the usual assortment of kids and spouses. The pair work together like seasoned pros, but the rabid man bashing is overwrought, and too many of the jokes seem to have been unloaded directly from their comedy-club trunk. (On being given drugs during labor: "That epidural was better than the sex that got me there.") As vehicles go, The Mommies does not seem conditioned for the long haul.

Of all the stand-up-inspired sitcoms, ABC's Grace Under Fire may have the best chance for survival. Brett Butler, a big-boned, Alabama-born comic, plays a divorced mother raising three kids while holding down a job at the local oil refinery. Once again, the stand-up material is too easy to spot. Discussing her abusive ex-husband, Grace unloads a torrent of put-downs: "His idea of foreplay was waking me up . . . He moved his lips while reading stop signs." But Butler projects easygoing authenticity, and the program has a good grip on the dogged drama of single motherhood.

Turning shows over to amateurs, however, can be treacherous. Starring in ABC's George is former heavyweight boxing champ and TV neophyte George Foreman. Cast (surprise) as an ex-heavyweight champ who works with problem kids in an after-school program, he stiffly delivers lines that are as subtle as a punch in the ribs. "End round one," he says after an encounter with the incorrigibles. "I took some shots, but I ain't down yet." The series, however, is already flat on the mat.

Even competent performers can falter when they step into the star spot for the first time. Fran Drescher got a few laughs as the Jewish member of a trio of New York City roommates in the failed sitcom Princesses. In CBS's The Nanny, she takes her Long Island whine into a stuffy Brahmin household and turns it into a grating one-note samba. Valerie Bertinelli, playing an American in Paris, exceeds her perkiness allotment even before her plane lands in NBC's Cafe Americain. And CBS's The Trouble with Larry, in which a missing adventurer reappears after 10 years and moves in with his wife and her new husband, seems to exist for the sole purpose of showing off Bronson Pinchot's frenetic "versatility."

Faye Dunaway doesn't have to prove her versatility, but she should have had better sense than to get trapped in a contrivance like It Had to Be You. As a - high-powered book publisher who gets romantically involved with a divorced carpenter (Robert Urich), Dunaway struts through the show with confidence. But she is forced to participate in clumsy slapstick set pieces and react to bad wisecracks about her sex life. Nosy secretary: "Find yourself a man who'd rather be on top of you than the Times best-seller list."

Yet most of the bright spots on the fall schedule can be traced to stars. Family Album (CBS) might be dismissed as just another shrill family sitcom were it not for Peter Scolari (Newhart) and Pamela Reed (Tanner '88), playing a couple who move their family back East to be closer to their aging parents. Everyone on the show is wired, from a TV-mesmerized son ("Joan Lunden's hair! What is she thinking?") to a splenetic, cigar-smoking grandfather ("I don't get it. You have your third heart attack, and everybody panics"). In the midst of this mayhem, Reed and Scolari keep their cool wits about them and help deliver the season's funniest half-hour.

John Larroquette is another TV star who has learned that less is often more in the hectic world of TV comedy. In his new NBC sitcom, the four-time Emmy winner (Night Court) plays a recovering alcoholic who takes a job as night manager of a seedy St. Louis bus station. The show's wryly dispirited ambiance is reflected in an old amusement park sign hanging in his office: THIS IS A DARK RIDE. Even when the supporting cast goes over the top, Larroquette, with his lived-in face and low-key assurance, brings everything down to his own comfortable rhythm.

Larroquette's co-star from Night Court, Harry Anderson, is just as understated and engaging in CBS's Dave's World. This is a rare sitcom that exists to showcase not a star but a writer. Anderson plays humor columnist Dave Barry, a beleaguered family man facing a classic baby-boomer problem: trying to raise three kids while grappling with the realization that he is no longer a kid himself. He sings I Am the Walrus in the shower (then looks at his body and exclaims, "I am the walrus!"), and can't get up the fatherly gumption to force his son to play soccer. Dave's World is the most charmingly laid-back sitcom of the new season, mainly because Anderson handles his vehicle shrewdly. He's not in a race; he's just out for a spin.