As Comedy, HA! Is Only Ho-Hum

It’s not scheduled to debut until April 1. But HA! The TV Comedy Network already seems like a bad joke.

A rival of HBO’s month-old Comedy Channel, the 24-hour HA! is a creation of MTV Networks, which also operates cable’s rock-music channel MTV. Whereas MTV began life in 1981 as an innovator that energized the music business by weaving rock videos into the fabric of television, however, HA! is beginning life as a renovator.

A renovator of network sitcoms.

Whatever happened to the notion that cable should be an alternative to regular TV, not an echo?

From all appearances, HA! is largely an echo. Although planning to develop original programming as well, it will open with a lineup that includes this orgy of reruns: “The Betty White Show” (1977-78), “The Tony Randall Show” (1976-78), “The Texas Wheelers” (1974-75), “Rhoda” (1974-78), “Phyllis” (1975-77), “The Lucy Show” (1962-74), “That Girl” (1966-71), “The Duck Factory” (1984), “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes” (1984-88) and “Love, American Style” (1969-74).

What’s more, HA! plans to rerun the CBS miniseries “Fresno”--whose satire won’t be any wittier now than when it first ran in 1986 or reran last July--and HA! has “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Bob Newhart Show” on hold until 1992 and 1993, respectively.

The disparity in the quality of these acquisitions is great, ranging from grossly unfunny “Love, American Style” to “The Mary Tyler Show,” which ranks among the best sitcoms ever. The point is not whether the reruns are good, bad or mediocre, however, but that they are reruns--used and reused goods, many of them already so well-traveled in syndication that they probably won’t be fresh even to the young audience targeted by HA!

Besides, sitcoms already consume nearly half of prime time on the Big Three and Fox networks. Plus you have all those comedy reruns in pre-prime time, as well as the ancient sitcoms airing nightly on that other MTV Networks channel, Nickelodeon/Nick at Night. Moreover, Nickelodeon will soon be rerunning episodes of “The White Shadow,” adding to cable another former network dramatic series like those already being aired on the Lifetime and USA networks.

So where is the justification for a new network foisting still more reruns on viewers?

HBO’s The Comedy Channel--delivering round-the-clock brief excerpts from videos, movies and stand-up comics--is not much to laugh about either. Moreover, sometimes you can’t distinguish the program from its ads, as in a comedy clip from the new movie “Steel Magnolias” flowing into a commercial for the new movie “Back to the Future Part II.” In fact, The Comedy Channel is itself one massive commercial, just as MTV is a commercial for the music and rock bands it will continue to feature in its soon-to-be-revamped format.

In partially relying on stand-up comedy, The Comedy Channel has become an extension of a 1980s trend that has seen both regular TV as well as cable’s HBO, Showtime and the Arts & Entertainment network evolve into an electronic Catskills, exposing America to comics of all shapes and stripes. The stage is broad, and not all the comics are funny. Take the bad ones--please!

Better The Comedy Channel, though, than comedy dominated by reruns.

Not that reruns are the sum of HA! It also has on its agenda a new series involving the famed Second City repertory company, and it has production deals with Castle Rock Entertainment (“When Harry Met Sally. . .”) and MTM Enterprises, which years ago gave America “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and other superior comedies. Glints of hope? We’ll see.

Perhaps HA! will turn out to be more exciting than it appears on paper. As for now, however, its rerun philosophy seems to symbolize the merging of new technologies and old ideas.

The promise of cable has always been new horizons and new attitudes, a way of doing things separated from the rest of television by the widest of gaps. And indeed it has provided some exhilarating diversity, from early MTV itself to CNN to some of the original programming on HBO that has been far bolder than anything on regular TV. The list doesn’t stop there, but it is a short list.

Despite a plethora of channel options, what we have, increasingly, is more of the familiar, a gleaming technology providing us with little more than different means of watching essentially what we’ve always watched. And as the dreams of cable and regular TV become interchangeable, as do the executives who dream them, you wonder about the future.

On board at HA! as a consultant is Fred Silverman. Yes, the Fred Silverman, the multi-lived former programming guru at CBS, ABC and NBC, and now an independent producer whose current credits include “Matlock,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Father Dowling Mysteries” and “Jake and the Fatman.”

The gap narrows.