BEYOND THE ONE-LINERS

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

WHEN COMEDY CENTRAL was born in 1991, the result of a merger between HBO's Comedy Channel and MTV Network's HA!, it was a cable network in search of an identity. Its mix of anonymous stand-up comics telling jokes about gender wars over toothpaste caps, reruns of old sitcoms like McHale's Navy, and a smattering of new programs (like Sports Monster, an unfunny spoof of sports wrap-up shows) was hardly exciting. Comedy Central should have been hip and edgy--a Seattle to the broadcast networks' Des Moines. Instead it fell Grainbelt flat.

Lately, however, Comedy Central has moved beyond lame one-liners and developed a series of signature hits. Among them: Bill Maher's irreverent roundtable Politically Incorrect (whose ratings have climbed 40% in the past year); Mystery Science Theater 3000, the perennially inventive spoof of bad old movies; and the endlessly rerun cult favorite from Britain, Absolutely Fabulous. Riding such successes, Comedy Central has tripled its subscriber count, to 36 million households, and today it reaches a higher proportion of affluent, educated, 18-to-49-year-old viewers than any other network on broadcast or cable.

Comedy Central's latest find is Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.S.T.). The animated sitcom debuted with six episodes last summer and became the channel's second highest-rated show (behind Politically Incorrect). Now it has returned for a 13-week run, providing an imaginative departure from the sea of indistinguishable sitcoms on the networks this fall.

Rather than trying to mirror the overexposed world of upper-middle-class urban life, Dr. Katz creates its own absurd version of it. The show revolves around Dr. Katz (his voice belongs to creator and writer Jonathan Katz), a divorced psychoanalyst saddled with a 23-year-old son who still lives at home. Unlike almost every other new sitcom on TV, Dr. Katz does not rely on fast and furious quips filled with trendy pop-cultural references. Instead it features surreal, laconic riffs, many of them between the doctor and his son Ben (who, after seeing himself mentioned in the newspaper, laments that he ought to change his name to something that "skews a little younger," like Zeus) and with his amusingly unhinged patients (one fellow believes his feet aren't finished; another thinks he's addicted to Robitussin).

With Comedy Central's success has come a problem: the networks have come poaching. Steven Spielberg's new DreamWorks studio has hired Katz to develop new TV projects, and he is already at work on two potential sitcoms, one each for ABC and NBC. (Katz describes them only as "animated and not Friends"). Meanwhile, ABC is talking about acquiring Politically Incorrect in 1997, possibly to follow Nightline.

That means Doug Herzog, Comedy Central's new president, will have to stay one step ahead. He's on the lookout for someone to replace Maher as "the face of Comedy Central" and hopes to launch three new series next year. Herzog also wants to rejuvenate that tired staple, stand-up comedy. The channel has attracted big-name comics like Whoopi Goldberg and Gary Shandling for upcoming specials, but Herzog is also looking for a way to showcase new talent that won't be "a guy telling jokes in front of a brick wall at Giggles in Cincinnati." If he can do that, Comedy Central will deserve its biggest round of applause yet.