The Season of the STAND-UPS

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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.