Jewish Guys (Not Gals) Win Some Zingy Parts : Television: Narrowcasting to specific demographic groups enables ethnic comedies to survive, but Jewish women still aren’t equal on TV.

One is a recently wed documentary filmmaker living in Manhattan. One is a recent college graduate working on his first job and first real relationship. The third is a newspaper columnist who just fell in love with a woman named Wally.

What they have in common is that they are all Jewish guys and they star in three critical hits of the new season: Paul Reiser as Paul Cooper in NBC’s “Mad About You,” Corey Parker as Neil Barash in Fox TV’s “Flying Blind” and Jay Thomas as Jack Stein in CBS’ “Love & War.” NBC has already renewed “Mad About You” for the second season, and “Love & War” is among the highest rated shows on all of television.

When you add this trio to Dr. Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow) of “Northern Exposure” and Jerry Seinfeld of “Seinfeld,” you suddenly have a lot of shows featuring Jewish guys making Nielsen waves.

“That is a lot of shows . . . especially in light of the history of Jewish characters in prime-time television,” said Lawrence Mintz, who teaches popular culture at the University of Maryland and who has written extensively on Jewish humor.

Mintz also said that if you examine the Jewish characters now on television in connection with the superstar popularity of Billy Crystal, you might even have a “new kind of male for the ‘90s”--a guy who is smart, funny, sexy but not threatening in the ways that some male sex symbols are. That, Mintz said, might explain the appeal of the shows.

The shows’ producers have their own explanations for the appeal of their Jewish characters. But, like Mintz, they all say that you have to start with the history of Jews in prime time to appreciate how unusual this current crop of shows is.

From 1954--when “The Goldbergs,” a sitcom about a Jewish family, was canceled--until 1972, there were no Jewish characters in starring, prime-time roles. For 18 years, not one.

In 1972, CBS introduced “Bridget Loves Bernie,” a TV version of “Abie’s Irish Rose,” starring Meredith Baxter as a young Irish Catholic woman in love with a Jewish man played by David Birney. Under fierce pressure from Jewish and Catholic groups opposed to the characters’ intermarriage, CBS canceled the series after just one season, despite high ratings.

Then, in the mid-1970s, as prime time became awash in “ethnic comedies”--such as “Chico and the Man” and “Sanford and Son”--Jews finally arrived on the scene in “Barney Miller,” “Rhoda” and “Welcome Back Kotter.” But, unlike other comedies that emphasized the lead characters being black or Latino, these shows featured Jews as non-Jews or maybe-Jews.

Danny Arnold, the creator of “Barney Miller,” explained it this way in Sally Bedell’s “Up the Tube: Prime-Time TV in the Silverman Years”: “We never said Barney (Hal Linden) was Jewish, and we never said he wasn’t. We deliberately called him Miller because it was an ethnic-non-ethnic name.” The Jew as maybe-Jew.

The first character allowed to clearly identify himself as Jewish and celebrate the fact in both an ethnic and religious sense did not arrive in prime time until 1987, in the character of Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) on “thirtysomething.” If nothing else, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, creators of the show, finally made it OK to be Jewish in prime time.

Jacobson believes that it’s a matter of trends. From Bill Cosby to Roseanne Arnold and Tim Allen, he said, television has been having great success packaging big-name stand-up comedians in sitcoms. Many of the comedians, like Seinfeld and Reiser, are Jewish. Because those comedians come with a pre-sold persona that involves their Jewishness, you can’t suddenly ignore that when the character moves into a sitcom, Jacobson said.

“Television has always been an industry of trends that way,” he said. “When you get one success, you then get multiples of it. . . . That’s part of what’s happening here.”

Richard Rosenstock, creator and executive producer of “Flying Blind,” believes the reasons are both industrial and cultural.

He thinks that the shift at three of the four networks, away from broadcasting for a mass audience to narrowcasting aimed at a specific and desirable demographic group, has opened the door wider for ethnic humor.

As recently as 1983, in “Inside Prime Time,” Todd Gitlin explained network reluctance to air shows about Jews by writing, “But in network and advertiser parlance, ‘the market’ is still personified as a hypothetical anti-Semitic Midwesterner ready to switch channels at the first sign of a Stein.”

But that’s the mass market. If you are only going for a specific slice of the market--say, the “hip and urban” slice--you can afford to blow off that hypothetical anti-Semite in the mass market.

But Rosenstock has an even more intriguing explanation involving how the culture of the networks’ executives itself has changed in recent years.

He said that a lot of the people now making TV shows and deciding what shows will go on the air “came of age during that great boom in American film in the late 1960s and early ‘70s when you had all these Jewish leading men breaking onto the screen--Dustin Hoffman, Richard Benjamin, Elliott Gould.”

In the end, there is no single explanation for the new Jewish shows. Reporting the trend is one thing; explaining it and the reasons for the peculiar history of Jews on television is a far more complicated matter.

To understand the history, you have to grapple with the psychology of self-censorship on the part of Jewish television executives, acknowledge the anti-Semitism that drove the McCarthy-inspired hunts for communists in the TV industry in the 1950s and comprehend the impulse toward suburban assimilation that overtook this country after the horrors of World War II.

And then there are all the questions and implications of the trend itself.

For example, Mintz cautions that before blindly celebrating the arrival of the new shows, it should be noted that they generally deal with Jewishness in an ethnic but not a religious sense and that we are talking about Jewish men but not Jewish women.

In fact, all three of the new Jewish characters--Paul, Neil and Jack--are involved with Gentile women. While attitudes on real-life intermarriage have changed dramatically since “Bridget Loves Bernie,” the issue is still one of passionate debate for many Jews. What are these shows saying about Jewish women and the issue of intermarriage? And what does it say about mainstream culture if television is celebrating Jewish men while jokes about so-called Jewish-American princesses are denigrating Jewish women?

Questions within questions. Jacobson, for one, says maybe it doesn’t always have to get this complicated.

“Look,” he says, “Paul Reiser and me are both Jewish, we’re both from New York, we’re both married. We said, ‘Hey, let’s do a show about that.’ . . . We just happened to be Jewish.”