Will There Be Clinton-Gore Sitcom Barbs? : Television: Producers say they’ll lampoon the incoming Administration just as much as they have that of Bush-Quayle.

When President-elect Bill Clinton spends the weekend at a beachfront home rented for him by two of television’s most successful comedy producers, is it likely to expect that his Administration will come in for the same ribbing from Hollywood sitcoms as those of his Republican predecessors?

Of course, say the producers of network TV’s most politically topical sitcoms--”Designing Women,” “Murphy Brown” and “The Powers That Be.”

“We’ll write about whatever’s funny,” says Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, co-executive producer of CBS’ “Designing Women,” a close friend of the President-elect. She and her husband, co-producer Harry Thomason, hosted the Clintons last weekend at their Summerland home and will help stage the inauguration festivities. But, she insists, “we enjoy being contrarian more than being partisan and I have to separate my professional life from my personal friendship.”

“We’ll be looking for things that are funny,” promises Gary Dontzig, co-executive producer of CBS’ “Murphy Brown.”

“With Bush and Quayle, it was right out there: It was so easy to see. We haven’t seen enough of Clinton and Gore yet to know what’s going to be funny, but we’re assuming that there will be funny stuff because there’s always funny stuff. You show me an administration where there wasn’t funny stuff.”

And political veteran Norman Lear, whose “The Powers That Be” on NBC views Washington through the befuddled eyes of a U.S. senator who happens to be a Democrat, declares, “I have for the longest time found as much fault with my own party as with the Republicans. If there is a true agenda to carry 250 million people into the millennium, it will surface in the coming years. It hasn’t surfaced to this minute. So long as it doesn’t surface, there will be plenty to satirize.”

Not everyone is convinced that they will take advantage of such opportunities.

“You think Al Gore is going to get the same treatment that Dan Quayle did? You think Bill Clinton is going to get the same treatment given Ronald Reagan? Never,” declares L. Brent Bozell III, publisher of TV, etc., a conservative newsletter that critiques what it sees as the liberal bias of Hollywood-produced entertainment. “There’s definitely a double standard at work here; to think otherwise is to ignore the fact that (these producers) were supporters of (Clinton).”

All three producers predictably cite entertainment as their main goal and are quick to assert their own shows’ even-handedness.

Bloodworth-Thomason vows that she “bent over backward not to discuss the election” in her new CBS series, “Hearts Afire,” which is set in a Southern senator’s office in Washington, focusing instead on the romance between leads John Ritter and Markie Post.

“Designing Women,” she says, was political in terms of issues but not candidates: “We never, ever said an unkind word about Dan Quayle to my knowledge. I know I never wrote anything unkind about him. In fact, I even had Charlene, one of the main characters, write Dan Quayle a letter to say he was doing a really fine job.”

The squabble between “Murphy Brown” and Dan Quayle was public and rancorous, but Dontzig observes, “That was a specific instance. It was an aberrant situation. The show was actually thrust into a position that, as a sitcom, it should never have been.”

Dontzig maintains that while many people have the idea that “Murphy Brown” is a very political show, few episodes over the past four years have dealt specifically with politics. “Sometimes we go for several shows and don’t have any political references,” he says. “We have been accused at times of Republican-bashing, but we have had any number of references over the four years to Democrats as well.”

Lear devised the amiable senator played by John Forsythe in “The Powers That Be” following the Clarence Thomas Senate judiciary committee hearings.

“We saw an array of empty suits, Democrat and Republican; men who were totally out of the mainstream, having no connection with the culture, let alone with women,” Lear observes. “That’s who he is. I never thought of satirizing him as a Republican. He’s any one of those guys in suits that we watched mishandling Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas.”

Bloodworth-Thomason, who also created CBS’ “Evening Shade,” says that she will not be a sitcom spokeswoman for Clinton: “There’s no danger of that because I’ve never done it in the past. I have never done any pro-Clinton material in any way on any of my shows. I pretty well know his opinions on everything and I don’t think we have any great gulf between us on any issue. If we did, I wouldn’t hesitate to illuminate my own opinion on the show if it was contrary to his.

“I think Bill really enjoys people confronting him. They’ve been doing it for 15 years in Arkansas; they stop him on the street every day and tell him what they don’t like. It wouldn’t even ruffle a feather on him for me to do that.”

Dontzig confirms that newswoman Murphy Brown will continue to have a difficult relationship with those in power, no matter who they are.

“We are assuming that there will be the same type of acerbic humor that we’re known for,” he says. “We just have to wait and see what they do. There was a certain looseness to Dan Quayle that was very funny. Who knows what Clinton and Gore will show up? There’s something funny about the coming vice president’s--I don’t want to say rigidity, exactly--but he’s quite a bit tighter than Dan Quayle in a lot of ways, so there may be some humor to be found in that.”

Nothing is off-limits, all three insist. “I think the public just wants to get a sense that you’re fair, or at least that you’re open about what your opinion is,” Bloodworth-Thomason believes.