‘WKRP’ Producer Fashions ‘Teddy Z’ for Rise to Fame

When CBS previewed its fall pilots to advertisers recently, producer Hugh Wilson was called upon to make an impromptu speech about his new half-hour comedy “The Famous Teddy Z.” “Don’t worry,” Wilson told the advertisers, a wry smile revealing a shining mouthful of braces. “It has plenty of jokes and lots of white people.”

Only those familiar with Wilson’s track record as a producer would understand his cryptic and somewhat bitter comment.

“Teddy Z,” which will debut this fall in the 9:30 p.m. Monday time slot sandwiched between the successful comedies “Murphy Brown” and “Designing Women,” is a traditional sitcom that stars Jon Cryer (“Pretty in Pink”) as a 21-year-old mail-room clerk who suddenly finds himself rocketed to the big time at a fictional Hollywood talent agency. It’s a far cry from Wilson’s last project: CBS’ now-defunct “Frank’s Place,” a decidedly non-traditional half-hour that featured very few jokes and lots of black people.

“Frank’s Place,” launched in the fall of 1987, starred Tim Reid as a Boston college professor who inherited a New Orleans Creole restaurant. It was one of several of that season’s so-called “dramedies”--one-camera, filmed shows that broke sitcom tradition by blending drama and comedy, as well as removing the studio audience and its laughs from the mix.

“I never liked that-- dramedy ,” Wilson says now. “It sounded like we were all post-Impressionists or something.”

The show won critical praise and an Emmy (for outstanding writing in a comedy) but never won a large TV audience; though CBS tried “Frank’s Place” in numerous different time slots throughout the season, it consistently ranked among the five lowest-rated prime-time shows. Last October, the network finally, apologetically, axed it.

The cancellation came as a relief to Wilson, if not to star and co-executive producer Reid, whom Wilson says would have liked to continue.

“It was so hard to do; it took so long to shoot and to write,” Wilson said. “If it had been successful, none of that effort would have made you tired. But to work that hard and have the show put in (disadvantageous) time slots, and then we were off the air on hiatus--’on hiatus’ is a lovely word for

-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-you-so-we’re-going-to-throw-you-on-the-shelf’. . . . All that was really emotionally grinding.

“Plus, it was angering, and somewhat embarrassing, to work that hard on a show and see it ranked 70th, or 71st. You almost say: ‘Oh, what the hell. The hell with it.’ I’m a little bitter--yeah.”

After the death of “Frank’s Place,” the weary Wilson signed a contract to develop new programs for Columbia Pictures Television; “Teddy Z” is the first. Wilson, always appreciative of CBS’ putting “Frank’s Place” on the air at all, gave the network first dibs on the show.

No one at Columbia told Wilson to create the sort of mainstream, commercial comedy that “Teddy Z” is, but, he said, “I knew it would be inappropriate at this time for me to attempt anything like ‘Frank’s Place.’

“I had more of a cynical feeling (about producing ‘Teddy Z’),” Wilson said. “Columbia made me an outstanding offer I just couldn’t refuse, and I guess I thought I’d be doing this for the money.

“But now, with this cast and this show, I’ve fallen in love again.”

The show centers on Teddy Zakalokis, a nice Greek kid from Torrance whose father and grandmother expect him to work in the family bakery, and who is unexpectedly thrust into the show-business maelstrom when Major Talent Agency’s biggest star demands that Teddy be promoted from the mail room to represent him after a chance meeting. Along with Cryer, “Teddy Z” features Milton Selzer, Jane Sibbett, Tom La Grua, Josh Blake and Alex Rocco. (Lainie Kazan left the show after taping the first six episodes as Teddy’s mother; the part was re-tooled, and Erica Yohn plays Teddy’s grandmother.)

Wilson noted that while “Teddy Z” is different from “Frank’s Place,” it marks a return to the “gang comedy” format of Wilson’s first television series, “WKRP in Cincinnati,” which ran on CBS from 1978 to 1982. And, he added, it’s a lot easier to satirize Teddy’s place, Hollywood, than to re-create life at a Cincinnati radio station or in the muggy New Orleans of “Frank’s Place.”

The story of Teddy Z is loosely based on the career of Jay Kanter, 62, now president of production at Pathe Entertainment Inc. Kanter became a legend at MCA in the late 1950s when, in his early 20s, like Teddy Z, he was sent to a local train station to pick up Marlon Brando and transport him to visit relatives in San Marino. Brando took a liking to young Kanter and, much to everyone’s surprise, asked Kanter to be his agent.

“He was the hot young star, and he was always very difficult to reach,” Canter shyly reminisced in a recent interview at his Beverly Hills office. “In essence, he said if anybody wanted to reach him, they’d have to talk to me. Suddenly, I became very popular.”

As his career burgeoned, Brando stuck with Kanter. “There are those who want to be represented by the more important agents with the company as they get more famous, but that was not the case with Brando,” Kanter said. Kanter continues to serve as the agent-less Brando’s unofficial liaison with Hollywood. “They still call me,” he said, smiling.

Other characters in “Teddy Z” bear resemblance to real-life Hollywood figures. The venerable chairman of Major Talent Agency, Abe Werkfinder, is based on the late Abe Lastfogel, patriarch of the William Morris Agency; Al Floss, the hyperkinetic agent, is “a composite of three or four agents I’ve met in my lifetime,” Wilson said. “I should say, that I’ve met in the last three or four years. I didn’t meet any agents as a child.

“The thing I have to be very careful about is not to let the show be too ‘inside,’ ” Wilson added. “That’s why I like to have the studio audiences come in.

“When we screened the pilot, the audience reaction was excellent, but a bit confusing. So many agents and network executives and studio executives participated in that screening, I’d say, ‘Is this an industry laugh or a civilian laugh?’ I call (the nonindustry audience) civilians. From then on, I tried very hard to limit the number of seats going to people in the business.”

Although he won’t use inside references if they detract from the action, Wilson doesn’t mind an occasional in-joke. He also doesn’t mind a few gags that only he gets.

“I once heard an agent out here who kept calling one of his clients ‘the greatest actor in the American language.’ I put that in; nobody laughed. But who cares?” Wilson said.

Wilson, who defected from the advertising business in Atlanta in his early 30s to break into the entertainment industry, beginning at a low-level position with MTM Enterprises, said his experience differed greatly from Teddy Zakalokis’ meteoric rise to the top.

“He’s awfully young and this is all so sudden, and so accidental,” he said. “In a way, though, when he tells his (grandmother), ‘You know, all these people drive Mercedes, but they don’t seem all that much smarter to me,’ I think I might be quoting myself.”