Is a Sitcom a Hit Just Because the Network Says So?

NBC will air episodes of “Watching Ellie,” its midseason comedy starring Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Tuesday night at 8:30, then again at 9:30. The show has had a limited run (only five episodes have played thus far), but already it’s been declared a hit by NBC and written off by the media.

So which is it? Somewhere between these two extremes lies the show’s true status for next fall: Undetermined. Undetermined but closely watched, a predicament caused partly by NBC and partly by the media’s unabated fascination with the afterlives of the “Seinfeld” cast.

The difficulty of launching new hit comedies is an old story getting older. Still, there also appears to be a disconnect between what audiences are actually embracing and more daring or critically lauded programs networks are eager to brand as hits.

“Watching Ellie” is a show that tells its story each week in real time and by the producer’s own admission doesn’t adhere to the traditional setup/joke rhythm. Yet while it’s been put through the spin cycle, people are actually heading in bigger numbers to CBS’ “Baby Bob,” a broad, gimmicky midseason family show featuring a baby technologically enhanced to converse as an adult.

For all the talk that networks need to reinvent, or at least tweak, the situation comedy to ensure its survival, the genre’s most recent successes look like television’s stock in trade--amiable shows featuring nuclear families with comedians as leads.

Fox’s new series “Bernie Mac” is probably the new critical hit of the year, both for comedian Mac’s world view and the show’s execution, but is it necessarily the future of network comedy?

Based on ratings performance, anyway, the future looks more like the past. Last season, CBS’ “Yes, Dear,” starring Anthony Clark, and ABC’s “My Wife and Kids,” starring Damon Wayans, emboldened the notion that a tired recipe (Take comedian. Add cute kids. Stir.) still has mass appeal.

At ABC, which has struggled more than any of the big four networks to develop sustainable sitcoms in recent seasons, “My Wife and Kids” arrived as a godsend, if not an outright hit--so much so that the decent performance this season of another family comedy, “According to Jim,” has convinced ABC parent Disney to put its development future into like-minded shows.

Half of the 14 comedy pilots picked up by Disney’s Touchstone Television, which supplies most of the pilot product to ABC, feature families with kids.

This may fill some comedy writers with dread and prompt others to call to mind H.L. Mencken’s famous line that “No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

“Advertisers, in the end, are looking to reach a particular segment of the audience in the least objectionable way,” said Bill Carroll, vice president/director of programming for the Katz Television Group, a consulting firm. “Unless there’s the very special episode of ‘According to Jim,’ most weeks it’s pretty down the middle.”

Part of the problem new sitcoms face is that the networks are so starved for hits there is a “win now” mentality, pressuring executives to label shows overnight successes.

While dramatic series such as “The West Wing” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” have broken out in recent seasons, popular comedies have proven more elusive. Last week, when “Watching Ellie’s” numbers ticked back up after several weeks of tumbling ratings, NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker complained that his new series wasn’t getting a fair shake.

“It used to be that the networks took a bunch of [grief] for not being patient with shows. Now we’re taking a bunch of [grief] if we have one bad week,” he said, referring to the alacrity with which the media were foretelling “Watching Ellie’s” doom. That perception was fueled by mixed messages from the network itself in terms of when the show was scheduled to complete its spring tryout.

In what felt like a move made to beat back the wolves, NBC announced last week that two more episodes of “Watching Ellie” will air April 9 and 16.

Tracy Newman, co-creator and executive producer of “According to Jim,” mostly sees a likable star, Jim Belushi, used to good advantage in the time period after Wayans’ show.

Behind the scenes, Newman says she and writing partner Jonathan Stark are doing nothing more provocative than bringing solid family scenarios to the masses.

“Most of this country is families with kids,” Newman said. “They tune in for a moment, and they say, ‘Hey, this is like us.’”

And that, in a sense, is all there is to it. “There’s nothing astonishing to say here. It’s comfortable,” Newman said.

A little more astonishing, perhaps, is the performance so far of “Baby Bob,” the CBS comedy developed from a talking baby character that first appeared on TV in commercials for an Internet service. The show has averaged nearly 15 million viewers and sustained the audience of its lead-in show, “The King of Queens.”

Moreover, “Baby Bob” posted an even stronger rating among advertiser-coveted 18-to-49-year-old viewers than “Watching Ellie,” a show aimed squarely at the hearts and minds of urbanites.

“It’s fun, family entertainment that is a bit of a throwback to some of the comedies that a lot of the baby boomers grew up with, and yet has been contemporized with the effects and the techniques that we use,” said Perry Simon, president of Viacom Productions, which produces the show.

In the absence of a pliable public, some networks seem to be in the awkward position of trying to will along more refined tastes, insisting edgy new shows are edgy new hits before the ink has gone dry on all the good press.

“What is the definition of a hit these days?” said Jordan Levin, entertainment president of the WB. “The definition of a hit is ‘Is it retaining its lead-in within 85%, or is it something that brings people to the screen?’”

Levin pointed to the WB’s first-year comedy “Reba,” starring country star Reba McEntire as a divorced mom. The show has averaged only 4.3 million viewers this season (less than a fifth the weekly audience for “Friends” or “Everybody Loves Raymond”), but it exceeds the network’s average, builds on its lead-in show and does well with the WB’s core audience of teens and young adults.

Here, in other words, with all of those caveats, is a comedy hit. So too is NBC’s first-year comedy “Scrubs,” according to Zucker, who deems it the “No. 1 new comedy of this entire season. However you want to measure it.”

But how do you want to measure it? In adults 18 to 49, which is what NBC insists is all that really matters, because that demographic dictates advertising rates, “Scrubs” has indeed performed well for a first-year show--better than anything except NBC’s canceled “Inside Schwartz” and its midseason series “Leap of Faith,” both of which were given exaggerated head starts by virtue of following a true hit, “Friends.”

“Scrubs,” about medical interns, has been airing most of the season after another true hit, “Frasier.” Its average 11.5 million viewers is encouraging, but on the flip side, “Scrubs” loses nearly a quarter of “Frasier’s” audience.

Is it a hit then? Regardless, NBC has been screaming about “Scrubs” all season, partly because the show reflects the network’s self-image and partly because, well, you have to scream these days to be heard. Fox, similarly, is screaming about “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” and “Greg the Bunny,” two midseason comedies that have showed promise in recent weeks.

“We do add to the hysteria,” Zucker said, noting that the networks are confusing viewers with all of their hit-show pronouncements.

As for “Watching Ellie,” Zucker, who has been politicking hard for the show, said the decision to schedule an additional two episodes to air this month was more than spin: NBC wants to see how well the show holds up before deciding its fate this spring.

“As we go into scheduling in May,” he said, “we want to know exactly what we have.”

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Most-Watched Comedies This Season

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