They Deliver the Slaps : Writer Favors the Unorthodox

Jay Tarses used to write jokes for a living. Now he makes people squirm when they watch TV.

“I like to make them do something ,” says Tarses, creator of the unorthodox television comedies “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story.” “Making people squirm is better than letting them sit there doing nothing--like oatmeal.”

Tarses began his career in television writing skits and punch lines with his former partner Tom Patchett on such comedies as “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Open All Night.” They also conceived and produced “Buffalo Bill,” a malicious 1983 sitcom about a recalcitrant talk-show host that was in many ways the precursor to Tarsus’ current prime-time programs.

But now, Tarses says, he just can’t write that way anymore. “Sitcoms today are formulaic and boring,” he explains. “What are you going to do with them, try to make an audience laugh? And if they don’t laugh, you’re dead. Besides, in life you don’t have an audience sitting there watching you talk to another person.”

So Tarses has abolished the artificial laugh track and the live audience and instead has constructed two television shows that don’t presume to resolve every issue in half an hour, or even in an entire season.

Each show has a first name and an introspective star character whom Tarses hopes the audience will come to care about: Molly Dodd, played by Blair Brown--a pretty, independent, occasionally neurotic woman of 35 who is not quite where she thought she’d be at 35--and Slap Maxwell, played by Dabney Coleman, a 50-year-old small-time sports columnist who suffers simultaneous visions of grandeur and of life rapidly passing him by.

“Slap,” which airs Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. on ABC (but which is preempted tonight), and “Molly,” which debuted on NBC last spring and will return as a midseason replacement, do make their audiences laugh, but they also make them uncomfortable. With her perky good looks and redheaded charm, Molly, for example, would probably be a darling, lovable, wise young mom on any other television comedy. But in her real-life world, where angst and joy are two sides of the same coin, Molly worms her way into the hearts of her audience and then just as swiftly unsettles them with her impolite tirades against her mother, sister and best friend.

Television critics love “Molly,” “Slap” and Tarses. They applaud them for their dark, sarcastic wit and for ushering in what some have called a “new breed” of prime-time television--one that in the half-hour format combines dramatic emotions with unconventional comic undertones.

The only problem is what to call “Molly” and “Slap.” The new label, “dramedy,” brings a smile to Tarses’ 48-year-old face.

“It’s a little like life,” he says teasingly about trying to categorize “Slap.” “It’s a man’s journey, a quest, the adventures in a day. It’s like Nicholas Nickleby and the people he meets along the way.”

But whatever the critics call it, the trick for producers such as Tarses is convincing the networks that American television viewers won’t be put off by the sharp humor of these unnerving and not always delightful programs.

Tarses is realistic enough to know that both of his shows must pull decent Nielsen numbers to survive. But he says that the networks, especially ratings-strapped ABC, need to take a chance on more challenging shows such as “Slap,” “thirtysomething” and “Hooperman.”

“There is a large chunk of fairly sophisticated people out there who want the kind of television that ‘St. Elsewhere’ provides,” Tarses says. “For an hour a night, there is room for shows of this ilk.

“I know a lot of people,” he continues, “and I don’t know one person who ever watched ‘The Jeffersons’ or ‘The Facts of Life,’ and yet they were on for years. I have nothing against shows like that, but I don’t know why I should have to write for people I wouldn’t want to hang out with.”