The Old College Try : Anthony Clark is working his hardest to help ‘Boston Common’ make the grade. So far, for him and the sitcom, the results have been first-class.

Anthony Clark--stand-up comic and now star of the 4-week-old NBC comedy hit “Boston Common”--is too busy to sit around and leisurely crack jokes . . . unless you ask. A product in part of his down-home upbringing near Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the 31-year-old, lanky, open-faced actor is unfailingly polite.

He has but one hour to be interviewed and eat lunch, so when the paper-plate fare arrives--seared chicken legs, mashed potatoes with gravy, beans--Clark lets it sit. “I wouldn’t eat chicken in front of you because there wouldn’t be enough for everybody,” he says, even though his guests insist. Fifteen minutes later, the food’s still untouched. “Are you sure?”

It’s just the way you’d expect his character, Boyd Pritchett, to behave. He’s the older brother who drives kid sister Wyleen (Hedy Burress) to college in Boston, then suddenly decides to take a job as a handyman at the student union and move in with her.

An all-around good guy, Boyd tries to be protector, much to his sister’s dismay, and to puncture academic pretense even as he fails, at least so far, to get the girl, a sleek blond doctoral candidate named Joy (Traylor Howard). Ivy League stuffiness is primarily manifested in Joy’s boyfriend, Jack (Vincent Ventresca), a preppy communications prof.

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Clark, a product of Emerson College in Boston, around which the fictional Harrington College is based, says he’s “never worked this hard in my life, never had to learn 50 pages of script every four days.” Now he’ll even light up a cigarette--”I’m just nervous.”

Yet his work and that of the creative team on “Boston Common”--executive-produced by Max Mutchnick, 30, who was best friends with Clark at Emerson (class of 1987), and David Kohan, 31, who was best friends with Mutchnick at Beverly Hills High--has paid off. The series will be getting a second season.

“Absolutely,” NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield said in a recent interview, adding that he intends to open it right after the Olympics end in early August. Whether it will remain in its current 8:30 p.m. Thursday slot between “Friends” and “Seinfeld” is uncertain. The original order of six episodes ends next week, but there’ll be reruns in June and July as well as a promotional push during the Olympics.

“This show is going to be real important to our future,” Littlefield said, happily pointing out that last Thursday’s episode ranked sixth among all programs for the week and even scored ahead of “Friends” in the crucial 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

“[The series] has a winning, positive feeling,” he said. “It’s something many people want and need right now.”

The quick and easy first take on “Boston Common” could be “Forrest Gump Goes to College.”

Not so, insist Littlefield, the producers and Clark, who says of his character: “He’s no simpleton. . . . The biggest words in the script come out of Boyd Pritchett’s mouth--a ‘whirligig of ebullience.’ Which I don’t even know what it means,” he says with a laugh.

“He’s a totally blue-collar, working-class farm boy,” Clark adds. “He’s a caring soul but he’s still very sharp. And I guess a lot of the critics have taken an easy swipe at the show because they feel anyone with a Southern accent belongs on the set of ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ or ‘Beverly Hillbillies.’ . . . I don’t know if Boyd is book-smart but he’s like every kid in America growing up with tons of television and film and magazines. You don’t have to be able to work out ‘A equals Y’ in algebra. Little gets by Boyd without him soaking it up.”

Much like Clark himself, whose accent is far less Southern than it used to be. On the show, he admits, “I twang it up a bit.”

Clark grew up in a blue-collar world, the second of two sons in Lynchburg, Va. His late father worked on a General Electric assembly line all his life; his mother was a bookkeeper in a clothing store. They divorced when he was 5. When Clark was 12, the family moved to a tobacco farm 50 miles south, where his stepfather lived.

By that time, Clark had already discovered the joys of acting and applause. He was Li’l Abner in fourth grade, had the title role in “Music Man” in fifth grade and in sixth grade was in “Calamity Jane.”

Emerson--alma mater to Norman Lear, Jay Leno, Henry Winkler, Steven Wright and Dennis Leary, who was his comedy writing professor--was Clark’s ticket out of small-town life. After graduating from high school in Lynchburg, where he was voted comedian of the year, “I kind of realized that if I don’t get out of here I’m going to end up working a drive-through, Kentucky Fried Chicken type of deal.”

Arriving in Boston in early 1983 “was like [going to] Oz. It was a city. It had lights, the arts, museums, nightclubs and stand-up comedy venues,” where he was making a name for himself by his senior year.

Mutchnick says he always knew that Clark, who has been in six movies, including a role in the upcoming movie “The Rock” starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, would succeed. When Clark did gigs at Los Angeles comedy clubs, he slept on Mutchnick’s couch. And when he began to “get hot,” particularly after HBO’s Young Comedians event in Aspen, Colo., in March 1995, Mutchnick says, Clark “suggested that [I and Kohan] write something [to] give him a little more cachet if he walked in with the script.”

The script, about a Los Angeles apartment house manager and his girlfriend, was rejected by executives at Castle Rock Entertainment. Kohan said “their reaction was, ‘It skews a little bit too “Day of the Locust,” but you’ve nailed the guy’s voice.’ So Max and I went back [and figured] we might as well draw from Anthony’s experience coming from Virginia.”

Castle Rock liked that approach and sold it to NBC. Now Kohan and Mutchnick insert some of Clark’s stand-up material into the scripts, from California earthquakes and Oklahoma license plates to family matters--like the line about his mom putting a microwave in her bathroom “because you never know when you’re gonna be sittin’ on the toilet and need to heat up a muffin.”