The Half-Hour That Never Happened : HORIZONTAL HOLD: The Making and Breaking of a Network Television Pilot, By Daniel Paisner , (Birch Lane Press: $18.95; 206 pp.)

Where does television come from? Daniel Paisner addresses this mystery by focusing on a group of talented and experienced people who think they have a terrific idea for a sitcom: Bring a naive young Midwesterner to Washington (Jimmy Stewart, anyone?) and put him to work in the White House, writing speeches for the President. The Heartland meets the Beltway, with a little “Murphy Brown”-style topicality thrown in. Provocative, intelligent television for grown-ups who read newspapers. A bright spot on the vast wasteland.

Much can go wrong between pitch and pilot, however. A good idea can get downsized by the suits; it can fall victim to budget constraints and labor rows and casting disasters; it can turn out to be smelly and full of holes. Or all of the above--which is more or less what happened when New York television producer Bruce Paltrow and his partners, co-creators of the phenomenally successful “St. Elsewhere” series, set out to shoot a pilot for CBS called “E.O.B.,” after the Executive Office Building across the street from the White House.

The title should have been a tip-off: If you can’t think of anything better to call your show, you really shouldn’t be putting it on. But Paltrow and company had bigger worries, like who the characters were supposed to be and what was going to make them funny.

Paisner (whose previous literary efforts include collaborations with Geraldo Rivera, Maureen Reagan and former New York mayor Ed Koch) takes us through the process from inception to turndown, documenting in almost day-to-day detail the messy mechanics behind the high gloss of network television. His book is a behind-the-scenes look at a half-hour that never happened, fascinating for what it shows and frustrating for what it doesn’t.

What it shows best is the screwball randomness of network television, where the unlikeliest premise can command enormous resources and generate a monster hit--or not. After all, except for three successful seasons, what separates “Where’s Everett?,” a 1966 CBS pilot starring Alan Alda as a man who finds an invisible baby from outer space on his porch, from “My Favorite Martian,” the 1963 CBS sitcom about a man who finds a Martian and passes him off as his uncle? For that matter, what separates “E.O.B.” from “Northern Exposure,” a quirky comedy/drama about a young New York doctor in Alaska, which was being developed at the same time for the same network by two other “St. Elsewhere” alumni?

In their more euphoric moments, Paltrow and his partners dreamed of a Monday night time slot for their baby (the time period “Northern Exposure” would ride to success instead). Mostly, though, they scrambled to keep the production from falling apart. That was hard, particularly because, as Paisner tells it, none of the them seemed focused enough to give it much quality time. Like most creative teams, the Paltrow Group hedged its bets by keeping several other series in development at the same time--a high-school drama about an American lad in London, etc. But even when their minds were on the White House, the partners couldn’t be pinned down on troublesome details, like what kind of injury the “physically challenged” character was supposed to have suffered. No one else could be pinned down either, which made for chaos on the set.

Ultimately, “E.O.B.” proved far less successful as a sitcom than as a pitch. Paltrow is a man who once had Brandon Tartikoff, then programming chief at NBC, referring to “St. Elsewhere” as “ ‘Hill Street’ in a hospital.” But while he and his team clearly thought they had something scintillating, different, a cut above the norm--”Cheers” in the White House, perhaps--the sitcom Paisner describes seems lifeless from the start. The pilot script had the Midwestern naif showing up for work just as the President is about to deliver a speech from the wrong set of cue cards; after much mayhem, the young man is told to write a speech on disarmament. Wouldn’t it be funnier just to run C-Span at double speed?

Some people had their doubts all along. A pair of suits showed up for a rehearsal and wondered out loud if they were supposed to be watching a drama. An executive at Columbia Pictures, Paltrow’s partner in the production, voiced second thoughts about the premise: Could the average American really relate to a bunch of presidential speech writers? It didn’t help that the creative partners had hired a director who worked by rote, that they’d agreed to shoot in a cramped, network-owned studio for budget reasons, or that they were rewriting the whole script a week before taping because they couldn’t cast a key role. At that point the network, sensing that Paltrow did not in fact possess Emmy-in-a-bottle, stepped in to dumb it down.

Despite the cries of anguish that resulted, it’s difficult on the evidence presented here to view this as a case of art defeated by commerce. Pretension defeated by cynicism would be more like it. Paltrow tells us he took up script writing because, when he was starting out in show business, he realized the scripts he was reading were so bad anyone could write them, even him. In “St. Elsewhere,” he and his partners fed on that knowledge to challenge convention; this time they seem merely to have complained.

Paisner describes all this in a flat, detached style that vacillates between dry wit and blandness. His occasional attempts at profundity are mercifully brief. For the most part his journalistic technique mixes fly-on-the-wall reporting with a talking-heads approach--long quotes in which the participants speak directly to the reader about their hopes, their misgivings and their inevitable frustrations. Unfortunately, what they say is sometimes more banal than revelatory, and Paisner’s performance as a fly is unimpressive: His reports of what happened behind the scenes are too often sketchy and vague, and several key meetings were apparently off-limits to him.

This is what’s most frustrating about the book, the sense that we’re only getting part of the story. No one can fully describe the demise of a television pilot without access to a wide range of sources, including the network brass who decide its fate. Paisner walks through the process as if wearing blinders; virtually the only peripheral details we get are anecdotes involving other TV shows. But then, it’s obvious from what he does report that tunnel vision is an occupational hazard of the small screen. If Paltrow had spent more time in the real world and less time lost in the mirror-land of television, his show might be one we eagerly await every Monday night. Who knows? It might even have drawn the scorn of a soon-to-be ex-vice president.