Newsroom sitcom deserves to be seen

[Brian Damage]

Back to You, the comedy starring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton, returns to the air tonight.

Again.

After drawing lower-than-

expected numbers in September, the very funny but underappreciated sitcom nevertheless earned a full-season vote of confidence from Fox in October.

Then, after seven episodes, new ones dropped off the schedule in November -- a victim of the 100-day writers strike from which series are only just returning.

Yet, while the strike hurt overall viewership and tragically made some of us re-evaluate our dependence on television, it just might represent the best thing that ever happened to the TV-newsroom comedy.

Why? Because, judging by its pre-strike audiences (an average of 7.3 million viewers), Back to You will be new to most people.

And that's good news for you, the viewer who likes to chuckle.

Grammer stars as Chuck Darling, a pompous anchorman who has returned to his smaller-market gig in Pittsburgh after an accidental dirty rant on the air. Heaton stars as Kelly Carr, the uptight anchorwoman and accidental parent he had left behind.

They are joined by one of the best comedic ensembles on television -- including Fred Willard, whom some might know as the funniest part of the Christopher Guest movies (particularly Best in Show).

Since the premiere, which performed the heavy lifting of establishing that Chuck and Kelly share a daughter he didn't know about, the show has gotten only funnier.

It wickedly mocks local news -- which, judging from my e-mail, is something that many of you should enjoy.

The TV schedule is still peppered with repeats and bad reality shows (do we really need three nights of Big Brother?), making now a good moment to revive Back to You.

A brief return already worked well once: After the conclusion of the strike, the comedy was shown on two consecutive nights after American Idol in February and earned the best ratings of its truncated season.

Then it went off the air for another month and a half, just for the sake of confusion.

Beginning at 8:30 tonight, Back to You will have at least five (maybe nine) episodes to win viewers and Fox. (It has yet to be renewed.)

The writers have to smush stories slightly to fit them into the shortened season, but -- because they don't have to explain, say, the flash-forwards or the appearance of the Freighties as on Lost -- they should manage.

I'm expecting good things.

While fewer comedies are taped in the studio-audience mold of the previous hits of Grammer (Cheers, Frasier) and Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond), Back to You is a throwback to being funny in a small space. It's wry, sarcastic, over-the-top and not afraid of a good pratfall.

Unlike other hyped series of the season -- Bionic Woman (NBC), Cane (CBS) -- with the detritus of the failures cleared away and your attachment to some series lessened by the strike, Back to You finally has a chance to prove that it has been quietly living up to its billing.

Molly Willow writes about television for The Dispatch.


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