Sitcom royalty: No heirs apparent

Comedienne extraordinaire Lucille Ball might love them, but she'd hardly recognize the new comedy shows coming to TV today.

Hot to hit the next big thing, networks are beginning to toss aside the three-camera, studio-audience format that launched "I Love Lucy" a half-century ago - and that still is used on today's winners such as "Friends," "Frasier," and "Everybody Loves Raymond."

These aging shows, which premièred from 1993 to 1996, still produce strong ratings. But hot new sitcoms are about as rare as "Seinfeld's" George Costanza picking up the check at Monk's diner. Desperate to retrieve audiences lost to cable channels and video, networks have begun experimenting with new kinds of comedies:

• "Watching Ellie," which premières this Tuesday (Feb. 26, NBC) follows former "Seinfeld" actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus as she plays an aspiring singer. The show is shot by a single camera in real time, with an on-screen clock ticking down the 22 allotted minutes.

• Stand-up comedian Andy Richter arrives on Fox March 19 with "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," a single-camera show that skips the laugh track and studio audience and features dream sequences and narration by its star.

• "The Job," starring another stand-up comedian, Denis Leary on ABC, is a single camera, half-hour "dramedy," shot on the streets of New York City, combining dramatic and comedic elements.

"I think audiences have been abused too much by over-laughed shows and too many multi-camera shows that haven't worked," says "Ellie" executive producer Victor Fresco. "I think audiences have soured on them and probably rightfully so...."

There has probably never been a better time to come through the door with a new idea, say executives hit with a deadly combination of recession-driven losses in advertising revenues and aging comedy hits such as "Friends" and "Frasier." (Though the "Friends" cast has signed on for one more year, next season will be their last.)

"This is a time when no broadcaster can afford to do the expected," says Susan Lyne, the president of ABC entertainment. "We need to occasionally surprise people, to make noise, and we can do that in lots of different ways. We can do it with subject matter. We can do it by breaking format."

"Watching Ellie," a vehicle for "Seinfeld" alum Dreyfus, is produced by her husband, Brad Hall. He has high hopes for his new concept. "Somebody going from one place to another, or someone alone in a room - you rarely get to see that" on traditional shows, Mr. Hall says. "And you rarely get to get the camera right in there [close] on [studio] audience shows." With the "Ellie" format, he says, "there's going to be a lot of comedy and a lot of character stuff that we are going to get by virtue of being with her all the time."

The question no show has yet answered is whether new tricks will add up to the next big comedy trend.

"There's a lot of tinkering and gimmicks right now," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse (N.Y.) University. "But what we need now is a genuine mutation in the comedy gene pool."

This doesn't mean audiences or networks will know it when they see it. The last big trend, epitomized by "Seinfeld," was not recognizable immediately, the media maven says. "In the beginning, 'Seinfeld' felt gimmicky," he says. "But what it ultimately did was open up the idea instead of premise-driven material, where you could have great comedy that dealt with the minutiae of daily life."

New ideas need gestation, he adds. "Most of these new shows, like 'Watching Ellie,' we'll expect them not to work. But that doesn't matter. You need people messing around with ideas to come up with something, for instance, besides lots of attractive people in New York, which is what it's been for the past decade."

Some of Hollywood's most successful and prolific producers say that despite what networks claim, they are often their own worst enemies when it comes to finding new TV gold.

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