ON LOCATION : ‘This Is About Real Stories in This Real Place’ : Television: ‘Tribeca,’ a Fox series set for spring, is a return to the dramatic anthology form. It’s attracting an A-list of guests who don’t often work on the small screen.

Leonard Street is a place you don’t duplicate easily on a Hollywood lot. It’s one of those narrow, amazingly crowded streets that seem to fester in Lower Manhattan. Double-parking of trucks is the norm. Tall, gray, foreboding buildings make daylight something that doesn’t appear for decades. People scurry and grumble through gaps between bumpers and fenders, trundling handcarts and racks and bundles full of who-knows-what.

“It’s just what I wanted,” said David Burke, the creator and executive producer of “Tribeca,” a Fox series scheduled to air this spring. “So many TV shows are about nothing and no place. This is about real stories in this real place.”

“Tribeca,” named after the Lower Manhattan neighborhood where it is being shot and set, is a throwback to one of the earliest of network TV forms, the dramatic anthology. It has only two continuing characters.

Noted stage actor Philip Bosco plays Harry Arsharsky, a former university professor who was fired for his leftist leanings a generation ago, made a little money in real estate and then opened up Zaydie’s, a local coffeehouse/bar, to provide sustenance and entertainment for his Tribeca friends. Joe Morton, last on series TV as the opera-singing assistant DA on “Equal Justice,” is a mounted cop in the neighborhood.

In most of the seven episodes of “Tribeca” already shot, Bosco and Morton only appear in a few scenes each. In one episode, in fact, Morton doesn’t appear at all.

But the list of those actors who don’t normally deign to do network series television, yet have appeared in those first seven “Tribecas,” is impressive: Peter Boyle, Eli Wallach, Kathleen Quinlan, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Lang, Betty Buckley, Carol Kane and Richard Kiley. Melanie Mayron, late of “thirtysomething,” wrote, directed and acted in another episode. The pilot stars Larry Fishburne (“Boyz N the Hood”) and Carl Lumbley. Nils Lofgren wrote the theme music. Santo Loquasto is the show’s designer. And the series is financed in part by Robert De Niro’s production company.

Clearly, this is no seat-of-the-pants, laugh-from-the-groin typical Fox show. If this kind of stuff keeps up, one could be prone to mention the words “classy” and “Fox Network” in the same sentence.

“The founding and guiding principle of the Fox Network has been to be the alternative,” said Sandy Grushow, president of the Fox Entertainment Group. “ ‘Tribeca’ is another chancy, risk-taking show. We’ve had an enormous success with event TV. The ‘In Living Color’ Super Bowl halftime show was an event. ‘Roc’ going live is an event. I view the format of ‘Tribeca’ to be event TV.

“Besides, this show is populated by many familiar actors from the world of motion pictures,” said Grushow. “The Fox audience is a young-adult, moviegoing audience, and I think they will find it wonderful to see these folks doing this interesting kind of TV.”

Executive producer Burke thinks “Tribeca” is all the more worth doing because it is both set in and filmed in New York.

“Aaron Spelling supposedly has this theory about producing shows that appear really bright on the screen. You know, you stop at this channel because you see a bright picture and, before you know it, you’re hooked on ‘The Love Boat.’ ‘Tribeca’ will not be bright. It will be like New York: tough, dark, gritty and extremely personal,” said Burke, driving from a sound-looping session in Midtown the few miles to his Tribeca office.

Burke said he has long wanted to do small stories with New York-trained actors on television. After various writing and producing stints on shows such as “Crime Story,” “Un-Sub” and “Wiseguy,” Burke was looking for a change. “I have written every cop story I could possibly want to write,” he said.

Still, it was his cop-story writing that got “Tribeca” going. Through a mutual friend, De Niro saw some “Wiseguy” episodes Burke produced. A few meetings later, De Niro was in. There was some thought early on that De Niro would introduce each “Tribeca” a la Rod Serling on “The Twilight Zone.” But for the most part, according to Burke, De Niro has stayed in the background.

“If Bob has brought respect and people to ‘Tribeca,’ so be it,” said Burke. “But I hope that these people are attracted by the opportunity of doing an hour of TV that can give them satisfaction. Only the West End of London has as great a reservoir of underutilized acting, writing and production talent as New York.”

Burke said many of those acting in “Tribeca” are taking smaller fees for the advantage of being able to stay in New York. He also said craft unions have cut their scales in return for the promise that, if Fox picks up more episodes, they will continue to be filmed in Manhattan.

Burke feels the “Tribeca” pilot is a real New York story. Fishburne plays the 34-year-old happy-go-lucky undercover-cop younger brother of Lumbley, playing a straight-arrow investment banker with a beautiful dance-teacher wife and two fairly perfect kids. Lumbley is unsuccessful in trying to make Fishburne, who loves night life a bit too much, into a better role model for black America. They chat over quick coffees at Zaydie’s one day, but the next, Lumbley is shot dead by a robber during his morning run along the Hudson. The events spur Fishburne’s hand-wringing maturation.

“Stars” Bosco and Morton have only about a dozen lines each in the pilot, something that doesn’t seem to bother them at all.

“This way I don’t have the burden of carrying a show; the writer doesn’t have to think up new gimmicks for me and can concentrate on a good story,” said Bosco, whose long career includes “Tribeca”-esque New York-based series like “The Defenders” and “The Dupont Show of the Week.” “Who the hell wants to see the same person week after week anyway? There are only so many tricks in my bag. After six or eight weeks, even Lucille Ball can only do a variation on a theme.”

Morton said he likes the “Tribeca” gig because it gives him a chance to continue directing and writing at Manhattan’s Playwrights Horizons. Part of his deal with Burke is to direct some “Tribeca” episodes.

“David is giving directors far more leeway than is normal in TV. The feel of the show is like an independent film,” said Morton, who has worked for that independent film master, John Sayles, in “Brother From Another Planet” and “Matewan.” Though he has used “Tribeca” as an opportunity to move back to New York from Los Angeles, Morton is not unaware of the difficulties of filming in Manhattan.

“Hollywood is where the industry lives. There aren’t the studios available here. It’s tough to lock off a street to shoot. And New Yorkers are not as tolerant when their lives are interrupted by a mere TV show,” Morton said. “In fact, there was tension on Leonard Street when we started shooting there. In L.A., you know there are specific places where people are used to this kind of thing. In New York, you have to be part of the city. But that is what makes it a far more interesting place to work.”

Burke and his crew have taken over several floors of a 100-year-old building on Leonard Street that, in a more prosperous era, was a dry-goods emporium. The first floor, with wide picture windows, is Zaydie’s, the coffeehouse. Up treacherous staircases is stark loft space that serves as staging areas for extras and, in jerry-built cubicles smaller than your average jail cells, are the “star” dressing rooms. The dank, low-ceilinged, pillar-strewn basement is often crowded with 30-odd crew members, atmospheric shots Burke hopes are emblematic of his cherished project.

“Most of network TV is pretty lousy, and I know everyone thinks their show rises above that,” Burke said. “But I think the people ‘Tribeca’ has attracted--people who rarely, if ever, do TV--without having anything on the air yet, proves that we have something unusual here.”