‘FRANK’S’ A FUN PLACE OF DEPTH AND TEXTURE

The new CBS series “Frank’s Place” is such a terrific hoot, such pure, smoky, filmy joy that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s television’s big ebony, located in America’s Big Easy, a smashing half hour of mostly comedy--at 8 p.m. Mondays on Channels 2 and 8--set in a New Orleans restaurant/bar with a predominantly black staff and clientele and funky zydeco music in the background.

The boss is newly arrived Ivy League Prof. Frank Parrish, who inherited Chez Louisiane from his father and doesn’t know a thing about running it. Frank is the core of the series, but endearing satellite characters and the Chez itself provide much of the charm and fascination.

“Frank’s Place” oozes atmosphere, the characters ooze character and the stories--all unsupported by a laugh track--are rich, vibrant and saucy. Often hilarious, “Frank’s Place” is also deep-dish television, soulful, thoughtful and unconventional, a show of many faces, moods, rhythms and textures, a comedy that’s not always a comedy.

In one scintillating, purposely uncomedic episode, an elderly Chez patron dying of cancer pretended to be drunk, then left and committed suicide by running his truck off a bridge. He hoped that his penniless wife would be able to sue the Chez after his death on grounds that it irresponsibly served him too much booze. How beautiful, mysterious and touching the story was, and acutely perceptive in its subtle truths about racial cultures.

In another episode, Frank rejected a chance to become the token dark-complexioned member of a snooty black social club where light skin color was a prerequisite.

“All my life I been . . . the only black,” he told his would-be sponsor. “I was the only black in this class. I was the only black in that organization. I was the only black on this team. Look, man, I’m not about to become the only black in a black club.”

Whatever propels “Frank’s Place” should be bottled by CBS and spread around.

“There’s something about this show,” said “Frank’s Place” star Tim Reid, a friendly, enthusiastic 43-year-old who first got famous as jive-talking deejay Venus Flytrap on “WKRP in Cincinnati.”

But this was no jive. “The energy of this show,” Reid said. “It’s like walking on water. For the first time in my life, I’m proud to be an actor.”

Reid is also co-executive producer with his friend, Hugh Wilson, the creator of “WKRP in Cincinnati” and now the creative backbone of “Frank’s Place.” In Reid’s trailer at Culver Studios, where “Frank’s Place” is shot, he explained how he and Wilson divide responsibility.

“Hugh is the wizard, and I’m the guy who keeps the people away from Oz. I say, ‘The wizard ain’t in.’ ”

The wiz was in one day last week. Southerner Hugh Wilson sat in his unfashionable office at a desk in front of an enormous blow-up photo of an unidentified black man that was used in the club episode of “Frank’s Place.”

There may be no one in TV less wizardly looking than the 44-year-old Wilson, who was born in Florida, lived in Georgia and still retains a soft drawl.

“The bridge episode is the best work I’ve ever done,” he said. About half the “Frank’s Place” production and writing staff, including playwright Samm-Art Williams, is black, but Wilson is writing and directing much of the series himself.

Can he write black ? “I’ve always been around blacks,” Wilson said. “When I get gun shy with certain stuff, I’ll go down and ask Tim. I was afraid the club story was too much like ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy.’ But he said it was funny. I’m more frightened of things than he is.”

At various times, blacks were TV’s invisible or stereotyped minority. Then came the extended post-”Amos ‘n’ Andy” era of blacks in comedy, capped by the explosive success of “The Cosby Show,” an intelligent NBC series about an upper-middle-class black family.

“Frank’s Place” elevates the genre still further. Without fanfare, in fact, it has become TV’s only black series whose central characters are not always engaged in comedy.

“I never thought a show like this could get on the air,” Reid said. “It is clearly an opportunity to show black people in a way you don’t ever see on TV.”

As it turns out, “Frank’s Place” wasn’t even Wilson’s or Reid’s idea. Credit CBS executives Kim LeMasters, vice president for programming, and Greg Maday, vice president for comedy development, with the seed and for not commanding a laugh track. And credit the William Morris Agency with getting its clients Wilson, Reid and Viacom Productions (which would be the producing company) to discuss it with CBS.

“Maday felt Cajun stuff was hot--maybe because there were all these Cajun restaurants opening in Santa Monica,” Wilson said. But CBS did not initially envision “Frank’s Place” as predominantly black, he said.

“Tim and I wanted to do something together and everyone knew I wanted to do something Southern. What wasn’t anticipated was that Tim and I would take it (the series) into the black community. We started talking right there in the meeting with CBS that nobody’s ever shown the black culture in the South. We divorced it out of the integrated setting and put it in the black community.”

(LeMasters recalls it differently. “Greg and I always had it as black,” he said.)

Wilson agreed to create the pilot--and then had second thoughts.

“I was hiding out on the East Coast after directing a movie with Whoopi Goldberg called ‘Burglar’ that was a thundering failure. I just didn’t want to do the series then. CBS asked me where the hell the pilot was, and I hadn’t even written it yet.”

After the network rejected his plea to postpone “Frank’s Place” to mid-season, Wilson quickly pulled himself and the pilot together. So rushed was everything, in fact, that the show’s wonderful cast was assembled in less than two weeks:

Robert Harper as Frank’s Jewish lawyer Bubba Weisberger, one of two white characters at Chez Louisiane; Reid’s wife, Daphne Maxwell Reid, as mortician/embalmer Hanna Griffin; Francesca P. Roberts as brassy head waitress Anna-May; elderly Frances E. Williams as waitress emeritus Miss Marie; Virginia Capers as funeral home owner Bertha Griffin-Lamour; Tony Burton as head chef Big Arthur; Charles Lampkin as Tiger the bartender; Lincoln Kilpatrick as the shifty Rev. Deal; William Thomas Jr. as Cool Charles and non-actor Don Yesso of New Orleans, the other white cast member whom Wilson hired after meeting him on a jet, as Shorty the kitchen worker.

The Chez Louisiane is impeccably patterned after a real New Orleans restaurant (Wilson uses a smoke machine and hazy lighting to achieve that misty look), and some of the characters also have real-life counterparts.

“Black people tell me it’s a landmark show because the characters have integrity and because they are real,” Wilson said.

Hanna the embalmer, for instance, is Wilson’s version of New Orleans embalmer Trencia Henderson. “I thought it would be right interesting to have a character like that,” he said.

Wilson and Reid met Henderson during a New Orleans research trip that included visits to four funeral homes. “We watched her work with a dead body,” Wilson said. “She was very pretty. She’d gone to college two years and then she went to embalming school. She goes in and picks up the bodies herself. She can actually pick up a grown man. She is right proud.”

On the phone from New Orleans, Henderson recalled the meeting. “They expected this dead-looking creature, a male, to come through the door, and I was not that,” Henderson said. Black funerals in the South are elaborate rituals, she said. “We have a full-fledged wake. It’s no cubicle where you see your mama. It’s the whole nine yards here.”

Some of Henderson’s experiences have already crept into “Frank’s Place,” including the story of her allegedly cold hands.

“There’s a myth that embalmers have cold hands,” she said. “So someone asked to feel my hands. It just so happened that I had just finished holding a cold beer. So when he touched my hands, they were ice cold and it freaked him out.”

Reid was born in Norfolk, Va. “There’s a sense of history for Hugh and me in these shows,” Reid said. He mentioned a character in the bridge episode who reminded him of someone he knew back home.

“There is a place in my hometown where I used to go in and get a small smoke (piece of smoked meat) for 35 cents. And there was this woman who worked there. I went back to this place in 1982, and she says, ‘Well, looka there. I know. You want a small smoke.’ ”

What CBS, Reid and Wilson want--and aren’t getting--is a hit. A series probably too sophisticated for its 8 p.m. time slot, “Frank’s Place” is lingering in the bottom half of the ratings.

“CBS tested it, and the test scores were higher than anything else they had,” Wilson said. “That’s why it’s at 8 p.m., as a building block (for the rest of the evening). I want to be at 9 or 9:30, but there’s nothing I can do.”

There may be nothing CBS can do either, given its present lineup showing only two half-hour time slots after 9 p.m. And they’re occupied by “Newhart” and “Designing Women” on Monday.

CBS has ordered an additional nine “Frank’s Place” scripts, however, which is tantamount to renewal for the rest of the season. “I’ve never been prouder to be associated with anything in my life,” CBS’ LeMasters said about Chez Louisiane and company. “If America doesn’t get it, it’s America’s problem.”