It’s Like Watching His Own Kids Fight

It’s tough enough to get a TV show you created on the air. But then to be forced to watch two of your series go mano a mano in the cutthroat lions’ den of Nielsen numbers is a predicament worthy of Job.

Except that the pay is a lot better.

“It’s a really difficult, bizarre phenomenon,” said Don Reo, who, beginning Wednesday, will watch two of his offspring--NBC’s “The John Larroquette Show” and CBS’ “Pearl”--square off against each other every Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. “It’s like that old joke: It’s like watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your new car.”

He won’t be cheering out loud, but Reo does have a preference on which he’d like to see win. To figure out why, note that he left “Larroquette” two years ago.

“The Larroquette show is in its fourth year and the last thing in the world I want to do is contribute to its demise,” he explained. “I’m emotionally tied to it. I created it. I created those characters. I gave birth to them. I can’t root against it, but at the same time I want the new show to be a big hit.”

The new show is “Pearl,” the sitcom that stars former “Cheers” barmaid Rhea Perlman as a blue-collar grandmother who heads back to college. It started off the season airing behind “Cosby” on Monday nights. “The John Larroquette Show” is now run by executive producer Mitchell Hurwitz.

“I’ve been very, very amused by that show and I’ve marveled at their inventiveness,” Reo said. “It’s not my vision of the show any longer, but when you leave, you have to let go of it. It’s not what I would be doing, but I don’t pull my hair out watching what they’re doing over there. I’m pulling my hair out here, on ‘Pearl.’ ”

In a comedy era that places a heavy emphasis on youth, both in front of and behind the camera, Reo, at 50, is unusual. His writing credits date back to “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “MASH.”

“There certainly is a trend toward younger writers and producers and casts in an effort to capture that 18-to-49 demographic, but I think that is spurious logic,” Reo said. “Funny is funny. When I created ‘Blossom,’ I was not anything near being a 14-year-old girl. Even if you set out to target that audience, there is no magic formula. So few shows succeed. It takes a combination of correct casting, good writing--and I believe when you die and go to heaven, God says, ‘It was all time slot.’ You have to have every one of those things to have a hit show. You don’t get it by hiring writers who are 19, casting people who are in their 20s or making jokes and references only to other TV shows.”

So instead of worrying about demographics or generational tastes, Reo sets out solely to create shows that he himself “could watch without wincing.” Again and again, he said, he has returned to the themes that interest him: stories about renewal, about people taking risks, starting over, trying something completely different.

In the case of “Larroquette,” that was a recovering alcoholic trying to get his life back on track in his 40s. In “Pearl,” it’s a middle-aged woman tackling college.

“You have to have a premise with enough resonance and characters with enough depth and potential permutations to sustain a series, hopefully for several years,” Reo said. “But it’s really all about execution. I think ‘Johnny the Stick’ could be a hit series if it’s done well--you know, the story of a stick and how the stick makes it through life. It could work. It has to be cast correctly, written well and it has to get a good time slot. ‘Underwater Rabbi’ could be a good show if it’s done right.”

Done right, on a Reo series, probably also means an ending with at least a dash of tenderness. He is not ashamed to admit that his shows often verge on the mushy.

“I’m just a sentimental old guy,” he said. “I love ‘Seinfeld.’ I think it’s the funniest show on television, but I couldn’t write a ‘Seinfeld’ with a gun to my head. It’s a kind of humor that doesn’t come natural to me. My shows tend to be more on the real side. I’m more interested in the people, in the way they act, than in the joke of situation.

“I always try to make each episode have a theme of a major emotion. We do episodes about fear or jealousy or anger or love, and then you can be as funny as you want on top of that, but it’s always about something. We don’t preach. I hate sitcoms with a message because the whole point of a sitcom is simply and solely to be funny, to entertain. But I think that stories that are rooted in human emotion can also be funny, and if you are funny enough, you can get away with some warmth without being arrested by the treacle police.”

Fresh out of high school, Reo was working in his father’s Rhode Island furniture store when he first thought about making a living being funny. He started writing jokes and then tried to sell them to comedians who came through town. A stand-up named Slappy White liked what he read and asked the 18-year-old Reo to go on the road as his straight man.

“So the next day I woke up and told my parents I was leaving home with a 52-year-old black man named Slappy,” Reo said.

He toured the country with White for two years, learning, he said, the true craft of writing jokes, then came to Los Angeles to write for “Laugh-In.” When that ended, Redd Foxx, whom he had met during his years on the comedy circuit, hired him to write several episodes of “Sanford & Son.”

“It was kind of a big break because there was actually a big division in those day,” Reo said. “You were either a joke writer or a sitcom writer. Like writing a sitcom was a higher art.”

Now he says he is eager to break out of the sitcom form. He is working on a show about Vietnam, through the eyes of one young soldier, that will be filled with humor, black and otherwise, but won’t require a laugh track.

“I would like to do something that is more real than funny. More meaningful to me,” he said. “But I still get the biggest kick out of doing this. I still get very nervous before a table reading of an episode that I’ve written, and on Friday nights when we shoot the show--even worse than it was when I wrote my first one.

“Some days I’d like to be somewhere else, back in the furniture store, but most days it’s a terrific way to make a living. I’ve got a room full of bright, funny people in there [his writing staff] whose job it is to make me laugh all day long. What could be better?”

Well, two different time slots.

* “The John Larroquette Show” and “Pearl” air Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m.--the former on NBC (Channel 4), the latter on CBS (Channel 2).