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TELEVISION; Can This Man Save the Sitcom?

TWO weeks ago, the little-watched Fox sitcom ''Arrested Development'' pulled off a remarkable Emmy coup: it walked away with seven nominations, including best comedy series, best writing and best direction. Just a few nights later, the show took top honors from the Television Critics Association for best new program and best comedy. ''It's been a crazy period of approbation,'' said Mitchell Hurwitz, the show's creator and one of its executive producers, last week in his office on the Fox lot. ''Before you know it, I'll be caught smuggling mushrooms through security at Burbank Airport,'' he joked, referring to the infamous drug bust that befell the Emmy-winning writer Aaron Sorkin, creator of ''The West Wing,'' several years ago.

The honors represent more than just a compliment for Mr. Hurwitz's innovative, genre-busting show. They may be its last, best hope for survival. For all its acclaim, ''Arrested Development'' is barely hanging on. The series -- which stars Jason Bateman as the only sane member of an Orange County family that loses its real estate fortune in an Enron-type scandal -- finished its first season as only the 120th most popular show (88th among viewers 18 to 49), with a meager average weekly audience of 6.2 million people. And despite Fox's efforts to cultivate new fans by broadcasting reruns this summer on Sundays at 8:30 p.m., ''Arrested Development'' consistently loses about a quarter of the audience from ''The Simpsons,'' which precedes it. ''An Emmy would be nice,'' Mr. Hurwitz said, sighing, ''but I'd settle for an audience.''

Ordinarily, he wouldn't get the chance to find one. But these are not ordinary times for TV comedy. The sitcom is in crisis. The overwhelming majority fail in their first season; among the few that became hits over the last decade, ''Friends'' and ''Frasier'' ended this year. Increasingly, they are being replaced by far less expensive reality shows like ''Average Joe'' and ''Wife Swap'' -- funny, yes, but not for the right reasons. Launching a successful sitcom, Daily Variety recently declared, ''is harder than trying to sell buggy whips in the age of the automobile.''

It's in this era of long odds that Fox has decided to roll the dice on ''Arrested Development.'' After a tense couple of months last spring when the show faced cancellation, the network has declared its full support, not only picking the show up for a full 22-episode season that starts Nov. 7 but moving it from 9:30 p.m. to the plum time slot right after ''The Simpsons.'' ''Its creative integrity and groundbreaking nature are all things we look for on Fox,'' Gail Berman, Fox's entertainment president, told reporters at the network's annual presentation in New York. ''We hope to see it build in the same vein as 'Seinfeld' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond' '' -- two hit shows that took a while to catch on.

Of course, the network said much the same thing before canceling shows like ''Undeclared'' and ''Andy Richter Controls the Universe'' -- and those shows had stronger numbers. But Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation, Fox's parent, is adamant. ''We're going to give it every possible chance,'' he insisted in a recent conversation.

Among sitcom writers -- a notoriously surly, schadenfreude-prone lot -- ''Arrested Development'' is being viewed as a kind of bellwether for the future of the genre. ''I love the show,'' said Jeff Greenstein, an executive producer of ''Will and Grace,'' which competed against it for the best comedy Emmy. ''But the feeling in the writer community, it goes beyond love. We're actually pulling for it, like the infant child in the incubator you hope makes it. It's so fresh, and so unlike the shows that came before it, that if it succeeds it gives hope to those of us who would like to do shows like that ourselves.''

That's because ''Arrested Development'' is trying to reinvent the rules of the half-hour comedy. The show trades the laugh track, multiple cameras and over-lighted stage sets that have characterized sitcoms from ''I Love Lucy'' to ''King of Queens'' for the hand-held single camera, natural light, heavily scored soundtrack and voice-over narration of a pseudo-documentary like ''The Real World.'' It's very much a post-reality-show sitcom, capitalizing on the influence of the fledgling genre and translating its conventions into a new kind of comedy -- broadly drawn but presented utterly deadpan.

Unlike Larry David's ''Curb Your Enthusiasm,'' ''Arrested Development'' is as rigorously scripted as an episode of ''Everybody Loves Raymond,'' with the same abiding respect for network comic tradition. ''I believe sitcoms are their own kind of classic art form when they're done well,'' said Ron Howard, the Oscar-winning director (and Imagine partner), who developed the show with Mr. Hurwitz and serves as a fellow executive producer. ''But I felt that there was a new TV grammar that was emerging, based on reality shows and going back a decade to 'Cops' and shows like that.'' In addition, ''audiences are getting used to, particularly in the reality shows, bouncing around from story to story and plot to plot.''

That Mr. Howard, who grew up on-camera in ''The Andy Griffith Show'' and ''Happy Days,'' was on board gave the show a stamp of approval that has helped sell it to network executives who might otherwise have found it threateningly edgy. Mr. Hurwitz himself is no stranger to the field. Like his fellow TV auteurs Alan Ball (of ''Six Feet Under'') and Lynwood Boomer (of ''Malcolm in the Middle''), Mr. Hurwitz, 41, labored for a long time in the trenches of conventional television, spending 18 years on sitcoms like ''Golden Girls'' and ''The John Larroquette Show.'' ''If they say the sitcom is dead,'' he joked, ''then I'm one of the guys who killed it.''

Another striking departure from sitcom tradition is that the characters on ''Arrested Development'' -- almost every last one -- are aggressively irredeemable. There's Jeffrey Tambor (of ''Larry Sanders'' fame) as the family patriarch, a disgraced mogul who undergoes a prison conversion to Orthodox Judaism and begins selling self-help tapes; David Cross (a comedian behind HBO's former cult favorite ''Mr. Show'') as a psychiatrist-turned-actor whose ambiguous sexuality and refusal ever to be seen nude is ruining his marriage; Portia de Rossi (best known as one of Ally McBeal's beautiful foils) as his wife, a limousine liberal supporter of innumerable dubious causes; and Jessica Walter as the family's ice queen mother, whose neurotic mess of a neighbor just happens to be played by Liza Minnelli.

''I'm not at all worried about likability,'' Mr. Hurwitz said. ''We have a very lovable cast, so I kind of feel like they're in charge of making the characters lovable and we as writers are in charge of making them hateable.''

The characters all have deeply layered histories, revealed through incongruous flashbacks or absurd plot twists. Thus the character of Buster (the priceless Tony Hale) is not only a weirdly coddled mama's boy; he also has a background in cartography, a skill that is suddenly called upon when the family finds itself trying to out-motor police boats. Alas, poor Buster thinks the blue on the map is land.

Mr. Hurwitz said that when he comes up with characters, ''I'm always nervous that they're not special enough, not detailed enough, or that there won't be more stories to go back to. So it's my neurosis that makes me keep adding things to characters -- giving them, you know, funny vehicles to drive on top of their speech impediments.''

It can all get a bit confusing, but that's where the narrator comes in. Mr. Hurwitz always planned to have one, to make the show feel like a documentary, but it wasn't until shooting the pilot that he decided it should be Mr. Howard. ''It was a very manipulative idea,'' Mr. Hurwitz observed. ''First of all, it makes the network think, rightfully it turns out, that Ron is very involved with this show and not just a celebrity putting his name on something. Two, it makes Ron be involved. He's got to be there, he's got to see it. And three, he's got a perfect voice -- because it's completely nonjudgmental. There's no spin on it, there's no wink.''

Mr. Hurwitz and his staff have accessorized the show with many surprising touches. Running gags unfold over multiple episodes, or tie together the looping subplots of a single episode -- as in the ''Take Our Daughters to Work Day'' episode, in which young girls turn up in increasingly bizarre yet totally unremarked-upon ways, culminating in the moment when a pre-teenager holds a shoplifter at gunpoint as her proud security guard papa looks on. The end of each episode features fake teasers, which purport to show snippets from next week's show but are instead stand-alone jokes. And then there is what Mr. Hurwitz calls his ''Call Forwards'': apparent non sequiturs which only make sense later in the season. (A casual viewer might have missed numerous tangential references to Saddam Hussein last year, but in the season finale, it was revealed that George Senior had built palaces in Iraq using the same plans the company uses for its model homes.)

One of Mr. Hurwitz's biggest influences is ''The Sopranos'': ''I love how sprawling it is. And how they can totally surprise you by, say, killing off a character. I want that freedom. We felt: 'Wouldn't it be great if we did a show that actually does change? Where people could die?' So I brought in Jeffrey Tambor to play his own twin so that if we had to we could kill George Senior.''

Mr. Hurwitz hired writers like himself: veterans of sitcoms -- in particular, veterans of old-fashioned mainstream sitcoms, which use four cameras and an extensive weekly rewrite process. (Shows like ''Sports Night'' and ''Bernie Mac,'' which have experimented with new narrative formulas, have also used just one camera, to give their series a different rhythm.) ''I know it's hard to say multicamera sitcoms are funnier than single-camera sitcoms because we're a little bit tired of the rhythm right now, but they are funnier; there are more jokes per page,'' he said. ''We all come from multiple-camera, and we aren't going to settle with the punch line of a joke being 'Ohhh-kaaaay' when what it calls for is a clever response. We work really hard on every joke.''

That's an understatement. Because Mr. Hurwitz did away with the usual process of sending writers off to compose drafts, preferring to lead the room in group-writing each episode; and because he also played such a large role on the set, and in editing, where he put in another 20 hours a week, the burden was crushing. For three months, January to April, he and his senior staff worked through weekends without a day off.

This year's work may be even more difficult. Creatively, Mr. Hurwitz and his staff must prove the brilliant first season was not a fluke, while at the same time fulfilling a directive from Ms. Berman to make the show, as she recently put it, ''more accessible, with more closed-ended stories.''

And so the writers' room on the Fox lot is already decorated with multicolored cards listing ideas for the coming season. The writers want to make Tobias, the David Cross character, an understudy for the Blue Man Group, thus requiring him to constantly wait by the phone wearing blue makeup. They may introduce a new member of the family who -- like the missing sister on ''The Osbournes'' -- had previously refused to participate. ''I'd love to go back through scenes from the first season and show her being blurred out in the background,'' Mr. Hurwitz said, laughing. Most audaciously, he would like Michael, Mr. Bateman's character, to chew out his son for being attracted to a cousin, then fall in love with a woman who will be played by Mr. Bateman's real-life sister, the actress Justine Bateman.

But for all the wacky antics, Mr. Hurwitz said, ''I think the more people understand that this is Michael's story, that he's at the center of this thing, and it's his evolution that we're really watching, the easier it'll be to follow. If you watch Jason Bateman you'll understand the show.''

David Nevins, the president of Imagine Television and another executive producer of the show, said that Fox already had plans to feature Mr. Bateman -- an established sitcom star and the show's wonderfully dry straight man -- more prominently in its promotions. ''We need to change the perception in the general public from the idea that this is a sprawling ensemble of eccentric characters to the truth, which is that it is actually a very relatable show about a family,'' he said. The new time slot could help, too. ''I really think we're a much better fit with the 'Simpsons' audience,'' Mr. Nevins added. ''I feel like, Year 2, with all the attention that we've gotten, we're ready for the klieg lights.''

None of which comes as any relief to Mr. Hurwitz, who can write uncomfortably funny scenes in part because he's almost never comfortable. Last week, Gail Berman scheduled a meeting to discuss the coming season -- not to check in on him, it turned out, but to give him carte blanche to do as he pleased. ''Oh no,'' Mr. Hurwitz said afterward, ''we would work so much better in adversity.'' And as for the acclaim the show is now getting -- acclaim that he credits with keeping it alive -- he could only fret about a possible backlash. '' 'Hurwitz chose his words carefully,' '' he narrated, in the dry tone familiar from his show. '' 'He was grateful for all the attention, but worried that it would make him the most resented man in Hollywood.' ''