Julia's New Domain

By Joel Stein

Television, being an expensive mass-market medium, is inherently conservative. And as in any conservative business, executives try to copy past successes. That's why you got so many sitcoms about aimless twenty-somethings who drink suspicious amounts of coffee. But something weird happens when the distinguishing characteristic of the successes--currently HBO's lineup of The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under and Curb Your Enthusiasm--is that they break the mold. What you get is a lot of shows copying not-copying: The Bernie Mac Show, 24, Malcolm in the Middle, Undeclared. You get Innovative TV.

There aren't many times when network execs are so open to out-of-the-box ideas, and so Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has spent the past four years raising her kids and living on fat Seinfeld royalties, is jumping in with hers. "It's not like I was dying to leap back into this," she says. "I was just excited by this idea." Her new sitcom, Watching Ellie, which debuts on NBC at the end of next month, is innovation packed. In addition to nixing the laugh track, using a single camera that follows the characters around, inserting songs and ditching the three-jokes-a-page rule, the show takes place in real time, so each week a clock in the corner of the screen counts down 22 minutes in the life of lounge singer and Los Angeles single gal Ellie Riggs, uninterrupted except for a freeze frame that precedes the commercial breaks.

"We watch it and we go, 'God, it feels like a cable show,'" says Louis-Dreyfus' husband and Ellie creator Brad Hall. He means that in a good way. Not, as he says, like "God, it feels like a local public-access show." Says Louis-Dreyfus: "It's a reinvention of storytelling, which a lot of the HBO shows are. [NBC entertainment president] Jeff Zucker realizes that he needs to do something different or else he's out of a job." Zucker was so enthusiastic about breaking the rules that he originally suggested not having commercials interrupt the show. Then he realized that was a much more direct path to being out of a job.

Zucker may be trying to overcome having given Emeril Lagasse a sitcom, but Louis-Dreyfus has to deal with the expectations that come from having been in the most successful show of the past decade. The expectations have led to articles about the Seinfeld Curse--which has been blamed for the quick demise of both The Michael Richards Show in the fall 2000 season and this season's Jason Alexander bomb, Bob Patterson. But 0 for 2 in the world of sitcoms is actually about right. The vast majority of shows don't make it past one season. Louis-Dreyfus attributes that to the difficulty of writing for the medium. "The thing about comedy is that you can't fake it. With a drama you can fake it," she says. "You can't fake the funny."

And then there's the challenge of creating a second successful character while the public is still holding on to the last one, not to mention seeing her or him nightly on syndicated reruns. Louis-Dreyfus and Alexander made fun of exactly that situation on recent episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the HBO sitcom made by and starring Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. In one scene, Louis-Dreyfus and David, playing themselves, pitch a show called I'm Not Evelyn, about an actress who can't get work because she's pigeonholed as the character she used to play. Louis-Dreyfus, however, has never pursued that sitcom idea in real life. "It's more funny in the context of Curb Your Enthusiasm than it is for a show," she says. "I haven't given it a thought."

Hall, whose TV writing credits include Brooklyn Bridge and his own series, The Single Guy, came up with the idea for their real-time show because he and Louis-Dreyfus often wondered what it would be like to invisibly follow waiters and salesclerks around for half an hour to get an intimate view of what their lives were like. "I wrote it as an exercise--just for fun," he says. Writing in real time, he adds, is easier than he thought it would be: "It's like a haiku or a sonnet. The rules are fun. And you don't have to deal with exposition. You don't have to lie with exits and entrances and wrapping things up."

Originally the show was called 22 Minutes with Eleanor Riggs--the running time of a sitcom without commercials--but that turned out to be inaccurate, since the networks now run more than eight minutes of commercials in their expensive prime-time slots. "The network didn't want to point that out," Hall says. Unlike Fox's real-time thriller 24, whose pace is quickened by several intersecting stories (and which neither Hall nor Louis-Dreyfus has seen yet), Ellie feels a little slow, and the dearth of standard sitcom jokes makes it seem less funny than you might expect. Much of its humor is physical comedy, since watching someone in real time means devoting a lot of time to watching Ellie walk, get dressed and generally run around. The format also encourages the writers to develop more subtle characters. "It's an intimate way of getting to know a person. There's an opportunity to see the moments between the moments," Louis-Dreyfus says.

The cast, especially Daily Show correspondent Steve Carell as her ex-boyfriend, is talented, but the show is definitely Louis-Dreyfus'. She even gets to sing on each episode, an activity she indulges in offscreen as well. For Christmas, she, Hall and five of their friends went caroling in their Santa Monica neighborhood. "No one was particularly interested," Louis-Dreyfus confesses. "It was a pathetic display of Christmas cheer. I felt like the biggest a__hole." Even so, her voice is surprisingly good, and her closing torch song is the best part of the pilot.

To lower expectations and buy time to let their show develop as it finds an audience, Louis-Dreyfus and Hall have made some unusual demands. They have asked to have their show be a midseason replacement. They have also offered to sell the network only 15 episodes a year instead of pushing for the full 22-show order most series crave. And they have requested, perhaps unsuccessfully (the final scheduling is still pending), that NBC put them on lower-key Tuesday night instead of in the middle of Thursday's "Must See TV" lineup, a spot so warm and cozy that even Inside Schwartz got good ratings there. These are things that happen to failing sitcoms; they aren't typically requested by new ones.

The abridged season, however, is also an HBO trick, allowing more time to work on stories. But whereas HBO, which is subscription driven, can afford that strategy, it's much harder for network shows. The real money for sitcoms is in syndication, and no one wants to air an old show every night unless there are at least 100 episodes; Ellie would need seven seasons to get there. Even worse, one-camera shows, which require more days of shooting, are expensive. Add to that the creative risks of the real-time premise and the fact that producers Carsey-Werner-Mandabach, who made The Cosby Show, Roseanne and That '70s Show into hits, pulled out a few months ago because of the huge financial gamble, ceding the show to NBC studios to produce. Says Zucker: "I need a show that works now. I'm a little less concerned about finding a show that makes 100 episodes. We stepped in because we want to take a shot with it."

Hall, 43, and Louis-Dreyfus, 40, insisted on the 15-episode deal because they don't want to take any more time away from their kids--their nine-year-old will have his own office on the set to do his homework, while the four-year-old will get a playroom. They're the kind of family that have an electric car and are building solar panels on the roof of their house to provide all the electricity. Vegas is taking bets on the method the children will use to rebel against their parents.

In order to work together without straining their relationship, the couple, who were cast members on Saturday Night Live from 1982 to 1984 and did theater together while students at Northwestern, have set strict ground rules. They don't talk about work in front of their kids, they have a screening service block all nonemergency calls after 6 p.m., and they don't ferry work-related messages to each other. "That's about it," says Hall, looking at Louis-Dreyfus over their cappuccinos at Santa Monica's Ivy at the Shore. "Oh, and the sex has ended."