‘Tattinger’s’: What Went Wrong?

The creators of “Tattinger’s” didn’t just expect to be canceled. They already had planned the plot of their final episode.

Nick Tattinger comes into his restaurant and finds it jammed. As he goes around and says hello to everyone, he sees Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, James Naughton and all the other stars, producers and writers of this season’s canceled or put-on-hiatus new shows.

“Then the end of the night comes and nobody can pay the check because they’re all out of a job, and the restaurant goes out of business,” says co-creator and co-executive producer Bruce Paltrow.

That’s just the sort of black comedy that Paltrow and his team used to write for “St. Elsewhere” and couldn’t duplicate on the new series. But they’ve got another crack at it now that NBC has taken the extraordinary step--at Paltrow’s suggestion--of renewing “Tattinger’s” as a half-hour sitcom rather than as an hourlong drama.

“The only reason they went for the idea was that Brandon (Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment) had it as well,” says Paltrow, who made the proposal Dec. 12 and got a go-ahead Thursday night. “It was the same creative thinking that caused him to renew ‘St. Elsewhere’ for Year 2 (despite dreadfully low ratings). And I promise that the new ‘Tattinger’s’ is going to be the flat-out funniest show we can do.”

“We were so desperate that we thought about reducing the show even further, like those old Bicentennial minutes,” says Tom Fontana, who created and oversees the series with Paltrow and Mark Tinker. “We were going to have Steve Collins come on and do a cooking recipe for a minute in between other NBC shows. Something like, ‘Hi, I’m Nick Tattinger. See you right after ‘Dear John.’ ”

All kidding aside--and most of it is self-mocking, since Paltrow’s people know better than anyone that “Tattinger’s I” had limited audience appeal--they say with genuine earnestness and a surprising amount of candor that they’re determined not to make the same mistakes when “Tattinger’s II” starts filming in February.

The problem facing them now is figuring out what went wrong and fixing it.

After all, when NBC slotted it in the prime-time schedule last spring, “Tattinger’s” was touted for its production company, which had an Emmy Award-winning track record; its stellar cast, which included Blythe Danner and Mary Beth Hurt, not to mention a bona fide hunk in Collins; its unusual premise and its exciting location here.

“Well, we must be a hit then,” Fontana says, amused. “OK, OK, we are a hit.”

In fact, just the opposite occurred. The show garnered only a so-so 25 share of the audience its first time out Oct. 26, dropped to a sickly 17 for the second episode and never recovered. It ranks 62nd among the 78 prime-time programs that have aired on the three major networks this season.

“I’ve been musing what went wrong in my mind, and I don’t think what we did was bad,” says Fontana. “I just think what we showed, people didn’t want to watch. Or they only wanted to watch a half-hour of it, which is why we’re only going to give them a half-hour.”

Paltrow doesn’t offer any excuses, either. “The network really held up their end, and our competition wasn’t so formidable. But the franchise ultimately was not realized.”

By all accounts, “Tattinger’s” ran into trouble from the start. In the opening three minutes of show No. 1, two startlingly brutal scenes took place: Nick Tattinger was gunned down in the street, and a woman was thrown through a plate-glass window. The critics immediately cried foul and blasted the violence as gratuitous.

Fontana says the point was to depict “New York violence which is quick and mean and terrifying. But what happened is people didn’t want to watch that kind of ugliness.”

Worse, the first episode suffered because for having been patched together. The pilot was partly reshot after Paltrow decided to redesign the restaurant set and replace some of the cast. “What we should have done at that point is thrown the first script away and thrown all the film away and just start again,” says Fontana. “But we didn’t do that. So the first show was wobbly.”

Then, Fontana says, the network and producers took a look at the second episode and said, “Oh, this doesn’t work. Everybody thought it was very soft.”

So, with pressure from the network, the “Tattinger’s” team moved the second script to the third show and replaced it with a new episode that was hastily penned and produced, “and which probably confused the audience even more,” says Fontana, who wrote it.

“So we tried to second-guess ourselves, the network tried to second-guess us, and we should have gone with our initial instincts.”

Collins is even more more brutal in his assessment of the second episode: “I had strong feelings all along that it was not a strong episode. And, in fact, for all intents and purposes, it stunk. So for people who gave us the benefit of the doubt after the first episode, they tuned in again and saw a worse episode. And that did really irreparable damage in terms of ratings. Millions of viewers felt, ‘Well, I really gave it a chance. Now, I’m going back to ‘Wiseguy’ (on CBS).”

Another early problem was trying to make the main characters as likeable as they are rich. “Dynasty” and “Dallas” are about the wealthy, but theirs is primarily a fantasized world; “Tattinger’s” sought to be more realistic in its depiction of Nick Tattinger, who has debutantes for daughters, a bachelor pad in the Waldorf Towers, Blythe Danner for a TV wife and still manages to be a real nice guy.

“I guess people don’t really want to believe the rich are nice. And, boy, if that’s true, it says more about what’s wrong with the country than about the series,” Fontana says. “It’s not that I’m saying rich people are wonderful. But I would like to think that you can do a sophisticated, smart comedy where the characters don’t have to be in a junkyard.”

With that, Fontana turns to producer John Tinker (Mark’s brother) and wisecracks, “Ooooooh, Nick Tattinger buys a junkyard! Let’s do that in the sitcom,” while humming the theme song of “Sanford and Son.”

Then there was the inherent trendiness of having an upscale restaurant set in New York City. Do arugula and radicchio play in Peoria?

“Do they even know what that means in Peoria?” asks Fontana. “No, but, then again, we wrote ‘St. Elsewhere’ at many levels and there were things that six people in Boston got that nobody else got. So I don’t think it’s wrong of us to put in stuff they don’t understand. But I guess we have to pay the consequences.”

Says John Tinker: “ Foie gras doesn’t mean a whole lot in a world of pain.”

A larger problem was finding dramatic conflict for the owner of a Manhattan restaurant. Says John Tinker: “The doctors in ‘St. Elsewhere’ were engaged in noble causes. What are Nick’s? Low-cholesterol meals?”

“The stories have got to be about our involvement in the restaurant (rather) than about helping some couple trying to move into an apartment in the East Village,” says Collins. “That’s when I end up running to the producers and asking, ‘ Why am I doing this?’ ”

(One ABC producer remarked recently that every time he watches “Tattinger’s,” “I want to scream, ‘Nick Tattinger! Get back in your restaurant!”)

The producers admit that they may have tried too hard to make “Tattinger’s” a less quirky, more mainstream show than “St. Elsewhere.”

“Tartikoff always used to say that ‘St. Elsewhere’ was the funniest half-hour on NBC,” Fontana says. “But we made a conscious effort not to try to do the same kind of humor on ‘Tattinger’s’ that we did on ‘St. Elsewhere.’ So people were disappointed.”

Trying to have more commercial appeal wasn’t any more successful.

“My instinct is always to go with the most depressing ending I can think of. So Nick almost never succeeded in my scripts because that’s really the way of the world. And it bothered me,” says Fontana. “I don’t know how to do ‘The Cosby Show.’ I wish I could. My problem is I would write an episode like the goldfish funeral and then have the plumbing back up. So Bill Cosby would be covered with waste for the second half of the show.”

Granted, the producers knew what they didn’t want to do on “Tattinger’s.” The question remains whether they ever knew what they did want to do.

“It was a conscious choice to remain open-ended,” Fontana says. “And so the show has been very schizophrenic and people got confused.”

Now the producers are planning not to squander their second chance to make “Tattinger’s” succeed. They will meet throughout January and establish once and for all where they’re going with their characters, their plots and everything else that’s in disarray.

“What we’re not going to do,” says Fontana, “is try something one week and try something else the next. The general consensus is: We’re going to decide what kind of show we’re going to make and all of us are going to try to write that show, as opposed to what we did before.”