THAT MADE-UP FEELING OF ‘THIRTYSOMETHING’

The 35-year-old TV producers sat opposite each other, slouched like two boys shooting the breeze, their sneakered feet propped on a coffee table in a cluttered Studio City office that resembled a large playroom. From time to time, Ed Zwick tossed a ball toward the ceiling.

The game is prime time, though, and like the seven characters in their charming, inventive series, the creators of ABC’s new “thirtysomething” are doing a lot of improvising--flying by the shiny seats of their ragged jeans.

In a general way, they have created a series about themselves.

Now, about that blueprint, the meticulous plotting for the future, the detailed long-range charting of a 10 p.m. Tuesday series that is crossing familiar dramatic turf--attractive middle-class urbanites face universal problems--in bold, imaginative, exciting ways.

“The truth?” Zwick asked.

The truth.

“We’re making this up as we go. You see, we wrote this great pilot and assumed it would never be picked up. And when it was, we began to back and fill.”

“We’re sort of stumbling our way,” said Marshall Herskovitz, the other half of The Bedford Falls Company, who seems to finish many of Zwick’s sentences. “Want to see our plan?”

The plan.

Herskovitz held up a small scrap of yellow paper with some writing on it and laughed. “This is our plan.”

However small, scribbly, fragmented and unimposing, the plan is working creatively, for “thirtysomething” is strictly upper case. It’s one sweet, heady swig of TV--not perfect or always successful, but an hour that consistently stretches the medium in fascinating ways.

Zwick wants to avoid the “metronomic three-fourths-time predictability” that atrophies so much of TV. “This is our laboratory,” Herskovitz said. Believe it.

Their failures are more interesting than most show’s successes.

An upcoming episode, for example, over stretches in juxtaposing dreamy romance tunes and the humdrum of everyday life. A brief sequence also steals shamelessly from Woody Allen.

After watching all of this delightfully balladic, Gershwinesque hour, however, your love for “thirtysomething” is absolutely here to stay. If nothing else, you admire a series that mentions two people costumed for Halloween as Will and Ariel Durant.

Michael and Hope (Ken Olin and Mel Harris), parents of an infant girl, have been the center of the “thirtysomething” universe so far. They’re careerists. He’s in advertising and she’s in motherhood. Parenting for them is alternately euphoric and stifling.

Zwick and Herskovitz promise at least a half turn toward other characters who tend to yo-yo through stories. The more turbulent marriage of Michael’s partner, Eliot (Timothy Busfield), and his wife, Nancy (Patricia Wettig), is on display in tonight’s “thirtysomething.” A destructive relationship between Michael’s cousin, Melissa (Melanie Mayron), and best friend, Gary (Peter Horton), gets equal time in that Gershwin-lament episode. And Gary, a long-haired college professor, is the center of a coming “back-handed homage to Hitchcock.”

Check the scrap of paper. There may be more on Hope’s best friend Ellyn (Polly Draper), too.

You realize right away that Zwick and Herskovitz are not exactly Frank and Ed for Bartles and Jaymes.

They met 12 years ago as highly promising American Film Institute fellows, finding they thought and dressed alike (and now both wear beards and write side by side on the same word processor).

The turning point in their careers came with their 1983 NBC drama “Special Bulletin,” which convincingly depicted a domestic nuclear disaster from the perspective of a newscast. Since then, Zwick has directed the well-received theatrical movie “. . . About Last Night,” while Herskovitz made numerous development deals and discovered “how things don’t get made.”

“thirtysomething” is one that did.

Even though its characters are mostly fiscally and intellectually upscale in their outlooks, “thirtysomething” overlaps humor and emotion in a way that is broadly applicable. “As far as we’re concerned, television very rarely had people who sounded like we did,” Zwick said.

The producer/writer/directors are fond of citing a cartoon showing a writer, surrounded by his many dogs, who is stumped for something to write about. “So write about dogs,” his wife says.

So Zwick and Herskovitz are writing about dogs.

Although “thirtysomething” is not exactly autobiographical, it is drawn from their shared acquaintences and experiences. The frequent crying of Michael and Hope’s daughter is a familiar sound to them, for Zwick has an 18-month-old son, and Herskovitz has daughters 5 weeks and 4 years old.

“All of our friends who presumed to see themselves in the show saw themselves as the wrong characters,” Zwick said. “Gary is an archetypical character in our lives. He’s based on a real Gary, but the character is no longer Gary.” And Michael and Eliot? “Nether of them is us,” Herskovitz said.

How did “thirtysomething,” produced in association with MGM/UA Television, arrive on ABC in the coveted time slot following “Moonlighting”?

Zwick and Herskovitz are convinced that their good fortune resulted in part from ABC’s bad fortune, because third-place networks are more willing to take chances on the unorthodox. ABC began the fall with a schedule that bore out that theory.

Zwick and Herskovitz made their usual long-range preparation for their pitch to ABC. They decided on the “thirtysomething” concept the day before their meeting with the network.

It may have helped that the ABC executives hearing the pitch--Chad Hoffman, vice president for drama development, and Mireille Soria, the department director-- were thirtysomething themselves.

“Then came that moment later when we handed in the script,” said Herskovitz, “and Chad shouted, ‘In this project, the material is the star. I don’t care who you cast, as long as you get the best people.’ ”

The nerve of the guy.

Zwick and Herskovitz had no choice but to hire an outstanding cast. They also have made their series highly cinematic--almost as if they were creating a weekly theatrical feature--and given it a realistic look and tone. So much so that they report getting calls from psychiatrists and marriage counselors requesting copies of specific episodes.

Like the ball Zwick tossed, however, what goes up inevitably comes down. Ratings for “thirty-something” have been steadily slipping after an encouraging start, and the series is retaining less and less of the large audience tuning in “Moonlighting.”

The impression lingers that Zwick and Herskovitz would be disappointed, but not devastated should “thirtysomething” die--that they’re TV transients who see their future in theatrical films.

“It takes all of our energies full time and we’re barely making it work,” Herskovitz said. “We’re just trying to get through the week.”

As always, a rewarding week for viewers, though, as “thirtysomething” continues dancing cheek to cheek.