‘Life’ Too Normal for Zappas : Television: Siblings say CBS dulled their sharp-edged sitcom.

Try this recipe for a TV series.

First, take two unusual siblings: Moon Unit Zappa, whose 1982 novelty song “Valley Girl” ushered in a new wave in pop culture, and her brother, Dweezil, an outspoken metal guitarist and singer whose last album was called, “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama.” Both are the offspring of cult rock star Frank Zappa.

Next, cast two sane and stable TV actors as parents. Finally, call the show “Normal Life.”

Bizarre kids. Straight parents. Laugh a minute. Hit sitcom.

That was the basic concept that Moon (“Unit is my middle name”) and Dweezil dreamed up when they approached executive producer Bernie Brillstein more than a year ago to do the new CBS sitcom “Normal Life,” which premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. “We pitched the show as ‘Addams Family Ties,’ ” said Moon, 22, the oldest of four Zappa children.

But things didn’t go exactly as planned for the two novice actors. Just how far is the finished series, which co-stars TV veterans Cindy Williams and Max Gail, from their original concept?

“How far is Russia from here?” Moon asked.

Moon and Dweezil contend that their idea for a sharp-edged sitcom was eventually tossed out the window, along with the Zappa family’s admittedly skewed brand of humor, and replaced by a safer, more standard sitcom. They also say that “Normal Life” has been plagued with writing, directing and casting problems.

“At first, it was a very ironic title--’Normal Life.’ Like, yeah, right,” said Dweezil, 20, suggesting that people who know the Zappa family expect anything but normalcy. “But, as the show went on, it really did become . . .”--he switched to his best zombie imitation and spoke in a monotone “. . . nooormal life.”

Gail, who was Wojo on “Barney Miller” for seven years, concurred. “There’s kind of a network within a network over there,” he said. “And there was this feeling that the Zappas untamed was not what an audience wants to see. Somehow when the network picked up the show and brought in a writer, suddenly the show was not about the Zappas. We went from ‘Normal Life’ to normal TV.”

CBS, however, says that the series has not seen any abnormal changes and those that did occur were of the sort that most new shows experience. Peter Tortorici, senior vice president of planning for CBS, said that any revisions were the result of creative input by everyone involved on the show--including Moon and Dweezil.

“The show has undergone some changes, but the creative changes have less to do with the substance of the show and more to do with the visual look of it,” he said. “It wasn’t that we didn’t want a lot of Dweezil and Moon. We do. They’re hopefully the center of the show. It was really a matter of taking their ideas and grounding them in a television series. The show is basically what we wanted and they wanted, but it evolved over time. Developing a series is a creative, collaborative process.”

But several current and former members of the series maintain that “Normal Life” did not involve creative collaboration; it experienced creative meltdown. Here’s how they say the sitcom developed:

* Once “Normal Life” was picked up by CBS for 13 episodes, the show’s pilot, which was close to the Zappas’ initial vision, was scrapped.

“The pilot was more to the left,” said executive producer Brillstein, who dismissed the sitcom’s changes as routine. “We did more outlandish things on the pilot, and the apartment looked more wild. We tried to go all the way. We tried to be funny and bizarre. But the pilot didn’t test well with audiences.”

* After the first episode, the mother on the series, feature film actress Janet Margolin, was replaced at the suggestion of CBS by the venerable Cindy Williams of “Laverne & Shirley” fame. Episode No. 1 was then reshot with Williams.

“If you know my work, you can see that Cindy Williams and I are very different and do very different things,” said Margolin, who is probably best known for her portrayal of an emotionally disturbed teen-ager in the 1962 film “David and Lisa.” “You can surmise what changes might have taken place in the series and what (CBS) was looking for by substituting Cindy for me.”

Margolin would say nothing further because of contractual obligations. Another source explained that CBS paid out her contract to make room for Williams.

* After episode No. 4, the show’s director was replaced by Greg Antonacci, who had developed the Showtime cable sitcom “Brothers,” about three brothers, one of whom was gay. After episode No. 6, Antonacci, now co-executive producer, replaced head writer Bob Fraser, and the characters were slightly revised again.

“At first, everybody was excited about the Zappa kids,” said Fraser, who previously had been a writer on the ABC sitcom “Benson” for many years. “But nobody had any idea what the show was going to be about. Everybody wanted their points of view aired. So a lot of people came to loggerheads.”

* Midway through production, Jeff Sagansky replaced Kim LeMasters as president of CBS Entertainment. One source said that Sagansky took a look at some completed episodes of “Normal Life” and decided that the father character played by Gail was not funny. Gail was also, admittedly, speaking out on the set and was seen by some as the instigator behind the Zappas’ unhappiness.

“The problem was in the creative process,” Gail said. “There was no interaction. It seemed like my contributions or interpretations of what was being written were seen as threatening. When I spoke up to disagree, they thought I didn’t want to play the comedy. I was amazed by that, because I love to play comedy. But there was nothing funny in my role. I saw the direction it was going and felt like, ‘Gee, I really don’t want to keep doing this.’ ”

* After episode No. 8, following weeks of creative differences, Gail was virtually written out of the series. He appeared briefly in episode No. 13 to board an airplane leaving for New York; that episode will be the first to air. “We wanted to explore what it would be like to have a nuclear family whose father isn’t there sometimes,” Antonacci explained.

* For the last few episodes, the producers say, the show ran smoothly and finally kicked into gear. “That’s when it started getting fun,” Antonacci said. Moon and Dweezil, however, said that that’s the point when they just gave up and went along with the program.

“I think television has such great possibilities, but it’s just too controlled,” Dweezil said. “That’s the thing. We wanted to try and get on TV and do stuff that was out of control, but we found ourselves being controlled. It was like Thespian Penitentiary.”

Both CBS and the producers of the show who were interviewed for this story denied having any difficulties with the Zappas or with Gail.

The two Zappa children, sitting in the shadowy den of their father’s Laurel Canyon home, said that “Normal Life” has its moments. They tried to subtly interject some of their humor into the sitcom by hiding bizarre masks and trinkets or writing strange epitaphs on the set while no one was looking.

Despite their criticisms, most of which were delivered with a laugh, Moon and Dweezil say that “Normal Life” is as good as anything on TV. Their problem is that it resembles so many other shows on TV.

“The finished show is more like what (Moon and Dweezil) envisioned than they think it is,” executive producer Brillstein said. “We simply pulled it in a little, and made it a little more reality-based.”