TELEVISION : Young, Single, Overcrowded : The fall schedule is overflowing with shows about unattached urbanites looking for love. Why does TV keep trying to send in the clones?

In CBS’ new comedy “Can’t Hurry Love,” Nancy McKeon plays a young, single employment counselor looking for love in New York City. In NBC’s new comedy “Caroline in the City,” Leah Thompson plays a young, single cartoonist looking for love in New York City.

In NBC’s new comedy “The Single Guy,” Jonathan Silverman plays--you guessed it--a young, single novelist looking for love in New York City. But while the friends of McKeon and Thompson are all single--just like the young friends in ABC’s new comedy “The Drew Carey Show”--Silverman’s best friends are married.

Jon Cryer can relate. He plays a young, single guy--presumably looking for love--whose best friend and business associate gets married in Fox’s new comedy “Partners.”

Thomas Haden Church and Debra Messing were young, single and looking for love in New York City--until they get married for convenience in Fox’s new comedy “Ned and Stacey.” Now they’re just confused.

Kind of like Elizabeth McGovern and Hank Azaria, who are young, technically single and in love with each other in CBS’ new comedy “If Not for You.” The problem is, each is engaged to somebody else.

Are you confused yet? Hold onto your Starbucks coffee mug, because there are still loads of young, single and married romantics--most of them struggling in the Big Apple--on the way in this fall’s crop of network comedy series.

“The fall premiere issue of TV Guide will look like the Queens phone book,” lamented one network executive, referring to the abundance of ads for the like-minded shows. “Breaking through the clutter will be the No. 1 job this season.”

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If you’re wondering how this happened, you need only look to last season’s Thursday night lineup on NBC, where “Mad About You,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends” dominated the ratings and proved especially popular with the very viewers whose lives were being portrayed on the screen--young adults. Advertisers of such products as credit cards, cars and light beer paid a premium to reach the young adults who made Thursday nights on NBC more popular than a no-down-payment seminar for first-time homeowners.

Jon Cryer remembers being up for a series four years ago that was being pitched by writer Danny Jacobson--before he created “Mad About You” with Paul Reiser. At a time when family comedies were the rage, they wanted to do an “Annie Hall”-type show--a neurotic romantic comedy set in New York. They were roundly rejected.

“The networks said urban doesn’t play,” recalled Cryer, 30, the “Pretty in Pink” star whose last TV series was “The Famous Teddy Z.” “They said, ‘We want something for the flyovers’--meaning the area between New York and L.A. The logic was that young, urban people were out going to movies and restaurants at night, not watching TV. ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘Mad About You’ and ‘Friends’ gave that the lie.”

I n a big way. The next four weeks will see 23 new sitcoms premiere on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, with many of them sharing the same ingredients as last season’s successful Thursday night recipe.

Even ABC’s hit “Ellen,” which was originally knocked as a female version of “Seinfeld,” will take on an aura of “Friends” this season. In the fall premiere, Ellen’s bookstore is destroyed by an earthquake and reborn as a combo bookstore-cafe where happening L.A. denizens will chill and chat. The twentysomething cast in “Friends” hangs at a coffeehouse in New York.

An NBC executive joked recently about creating “an anti-’Friends’ show” called “Enemies” for next season.

Not everyone finds the trend so funny, however.

“That audience, specifically adults 18 to 34, is not a loyal one,” said Ted Harbert, president of ABC Entertainment. “They’re very busy with careers and a social life, and they really only make time for a few favorite TV shows. There are far too many shows going after that audience right now to qualify as favorites.”

Said Ken Levine, creator and executive producer of “Almost Perfect” on CBS: “There’s certainly a concern that since there are a number of shows about upscale, single men and women trying to make it in the world, our show will just get lumped in with the others and create confusion.”

Not that the charge of copycatting doesn’t get thrown around every season. Just ask the producers of “Friends,” which is getting cited now as the biggest influence on the new crop of sitcoms.

“When we premiered last season, we were called a rip-off of ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Ellen,’ ” said Kevin Bright, who executive-produces “Friends” with Marta Kauffman and David Crane. “Anything that resembles the latest thing in any way is called a rip-off. That makes it easy to label, but it’s not fair.”

“There’s a tendency for studios and networks to see something that works and say, ‘We want to do that,’ which is a little naive because it’s not the formula that makes the show work, it’s the pieces,” Kauffman said.

“We set out to do a true ensemble show so we could follow many different stories,” Crane added, “and not fall into the trap of shows that do the same stories with the same characters over and over.”

I n fact, Levine tips his hat to the success of “Friends” for making “Almost Perfect” possible. His ensemble series stars Nancy Travis as the aggressive producer of a hit TV cop drama--in charge of a bizarre writing staff--who tries to balance a meaningful relationship with a successful career.

“The greatest impact ‘Friends’ had is that it allows us to create ensemble shows again,” Levine said. “There was this trend that you had to develop a show around a specific personality. It had to be around Jerry [Seinfeld] or Ellen [DeGeneres] or some other comic. If you went to a network and said, ‘I want to do a show with seven young faces,’ you would have a difficult sell. ‘Friends’ changed all that, and I’m extremely thankful.”

Chris Thompson agrees that each new successful shows nudges TV comedy in a new direction. He created ABC’s “The Naked Truth,” starring Tea Leoni as an award-winning photojournalist who scrapes by as a tabloid paparazzo after divorcing a wealthy socialite.

“ ‘Seinfeld,’ particularly, has given everybody a much more non-linear way of storytelling,” he said. “Have you ever heard of Andy the Ghost? You used to go into a network and pitch a character-driven story, and they’d look at you with glazed eyes, and you’d start to panic, so you’d say, ‘And, and, and he’s a ghost! ‘ And they’d say, ‘I love it!’ Well, that’s all changing.”

Indeed, the youth movement has turned out to be a blessing for many on the production side. The new wave of comedy series has largely ditched old sitcom rules by showing that a small situation or conflict can produce an interesting or funny conversation.

Free from formulaic story-telling constraints, writers are stressing character over convention, building episodes around such common activities as waiting in line at a movie theater or having Thanksgiving dinner with friends.

And the characters they’re writing about are essentially themselves. Jeff Strauss, 33, and Jeff Greenstein, 32, have been nominated for an Emmy for the Thanksgiving episode of “Friends” they wrote last season. They left the show this season to create “Partners” on Fox.

“We’ve been friends for 15 years and writing together for 10 years,” Strauss said. “A lot of the relationship in ‘Partners’ is based on our own. We both got married over the last three years. We thought we would have a real good time writing about trying to balance love with friendship.”

Similarly, “Can’t Hurry Love” creator Gena Wendkos lived with the characters in her series for many years when she was a single woman in New York City, scraping along on $20,000 a year.

“The reason there’s so many shows like this right now is because there’s a hunger among the audience to see them,” explained David Himelfarb, vice president of comedy development for CBS. “At the same time, the subjects in those shows tend to be what the most talented people in our business have something to say about.”

Brad Hall, creator and executive producer of “The Single Guy,” believes that television’s young producers, writers and actors are fast becoming the electronic voice of their generation.

“There’s a common link between the people who write these shows and act in them,” said Hall, 36, a former “Saturday Night Live” writer and performer. “Everyone went through their New York period, and now they’re here in Los Angeles. There’s a sense of shared experience. You can write anything. I can do a Green Day joke and people actually get it. You can draw from your mind, your friends, your world.”

C ritics wonder if that world’s not getting too small. Rick Leed, president of Wind Dancer Production Group, which produces ABC’s hit “Home Improvement,” points to a creative blurring with many of these new sitcoms.

“Every other show is about a bunch of whiny, New York Jews--and I’m a New York Jew, so I can say that,” Leed said. “You have a group of actors, all in the same age range, who are alike in one way or another. The stories start to overlap. The look of each set starts to overlap. There’s only so many jokes you can have on the same situation--people who are single and having problems dating, or people who are married and trying to adjust.”

“I certainly see a number of imitators out there,” observed NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield. “But I’m reminded of when ‘The Cosby Show’ was put on the air by NBC. CBS looked at it and went, ‘OK, black family situation comedy,’ and they turned around and put on Flip Wilson [in “Charlie & Co.”]. I don’t think it lasted a year.”

Critics also point to the segregation occurring in the network adult comedies. Nearly all the new entries are populated exclusively by whites. One exception is David Alan Grier in “The Preston Episodes” on Fox.

“It’s a feeding frenzy, and there’s no originality,” said Grier, 39, a veteran of Fox’s sketch comedy show “In Living Color.” In “Preston,” he plays a newly divorced college professor who moves to New York City to pursue his dream of becoming a writer.

“When I went to do my show, I just wanted to represent the world I live in,” Grier said. “If you walk around the block in L.A., Chicago or New York, you see black, brown, yellow, all walks of life. When the networks go for a young, urban audience, it’s either all black or all white, and that disturbs me.”

CBS executive Himelfarb took issue with charges of racial imbalance. “I’m not sure it’s a fair perception,” he said. “If you actually look at ‘Martin’ and ‘Living Single,’ they’re very similar to these shows, except they star black people.” Both of those sitcoms are on Fox.

NBC’s Littlefield acknowledged the lack of minority representation. He called it an “opportunity” for programmers to take advantage of in the future.

D espite the many similarities in their premises, most of the producers of the new shows dismiss direct comparisons to “Friends,” “Seinfeld” or “Mad About You.”

ABC’s “Drew Carey” is built around Carey’s stand-up act as a working-class single stiff surrounded by an oddball group of friends--two men and a woman. If that sounds like a blue-collar “Seinfeld,” it’s only natural, said creator Bruce Helford.

“If a person is single, his life revolves around his friends,” said Helford, who also created the new family sitcom “Bless This House” on CBS. “We’re looking to write about something universal, because you want to maximize the amount of people who can relate to what you’re doing. So what’s universal? Family and friends.”

Dave Hackel created and executive-produces NBC’s “The Pursuit of Happiness,” an ensemble series starring Tom Amandes and Melinda McGraw as a married couple in their 30s who are playing out the cards they picked earlier in their lives. But they put a different spin on things than the lovebirds in “Mad About You.”

“ ‘Mad About You’ gets a lot of its humor out of the newness of that relationship, two people finding each other’s quirks,” Hackel said. “My couple has been married for 15 years. What was cute and adorable 15 years ago isn’t so cute anymore.”

Mature couples are nothing new in television, but most of them have children. The pair in “Pursuit of Happiness” do not. “You introduce children to the set, and you’re doing less adult things,” Hackel said. “At the moment, we have no plans to add children, which is also a choice a lot of people are making in society.”

When Randi Mayem Singer started working on ABC’s “Hudson Street,” she hadn’t even seen “Friends.”’ She was thinking Tracy and Hepburn.

“I wanted to do a romantic comedy surrounded by an ensemble,” said Singer, a first-time TV producer who co-wrote “Mrs. Doubtfire.” “Hudson Street” stars Tony Danza as a divorced cop who falls for a police-beat reporter played by Lori Loughlin. “ ‘Seinfeld’ does not allow its characters to have deep connections, deep epiphanies. I want our characters to have those kind of moments they had on ‘Taxi’ and ‘Cheers’ and all those great romantic comedies.”

“Single Guy” set out to harvest the best of all fields by covering three primary stages of modern relationships. Silverman’s character is single and dating, while one friend is newly married and another friend is married and a parent. Because it takes time for characters to emerge, Silverman warned against judging any of the new shows too early.

“From my recollection of TV shows that are now hits, the first handful of episodes don’t give a real good indication of what’s to come,” Silverman said. “You basically look for potential. ‘Seinfeld’ was almost canceled after its first season, but the network stuck with it.”

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