How Fox’s ‘Ned and Stacey’ Escaped Sitcom Death Row

New TV shows that languish week after week in the nethermost depths of Nielsen hell rarely last to the end of their first year, much less survive for a second. But when all of a network’s other new shows fare even worse, sometimes a series can get lucky.

So it went with “Ned and Stacey,” Fox’s brash, bawdy and sometimes surprisingly sophisticated sitcom. It finished No. 122 out of 142 series on the four major networks last season and still managed to emerge as the only one of the 13 freshman Fox series that earned a renewal for this year. It returns Sunday at 8:30 p.m.

“We have seen it before--that for us it takes at least a season and a half for a show on Fox to take root,” said Bob Greenblatt, the network’s executive vice president of comedy and drama development. “There are so many networks, more cable channels, all kinds of original programs, that it is really difficult to find an audience. And with comedy today especially, there are so many out there that it’s virtually impossible for a show to get noticed. So you really have to stick with the ones you believe in. You have to be more patient. That’s our philosophy.”

Greenblatt said that “Ned and Stacey” benefited from that philosophy because it began to click toward the end of the last season with the 18- to-34-year-old viewers whom Fox prizes.

“That is our pattern,” Greenblatt said. “We start with that group and expand from there. We saw the same thing with [the initially low-rated] ‘Party of Five’ its first year and it turned out to be a real popular show. And creatively, this is a fun, high-concept show and Thomas Haden Church is just terrific at playing that kind of lovable rogue.”

Church, a veteran of six seasons as the oddball mechanic on “Wings,” stars as Ned, a pompous, narcissistic adman who entered into a sham marriage with Stacey (played by Debra Messing), a woman he initially despised, in order to advance his career. Broke and desperate to move out of her parents’ house, she agreed.

What ensued was a sort of “Odd Couple” infused with a big dash of sexual tension. But the premise got thin as the season wore on and will be altered this season.

“I do think we played around with the premise as much as we could last year, and then I think the writers started having trouble justifying them both still living in the same place,” Messing said. “So it is smart that we have a bit of a change of tact. It is difficult, I think, to maintain such a complicated premise. Look at the most successful shows, like ‘Cheers’--you have a bar and a group of people and then you could do just about anything.”

Last season ended with Ned and Stacey in a long-anticipated kiss, and then he threw her out of the apartment. This season, they will be going through the process of a divorce and, paradoxically, growing closer in the process. The series’ two other principal characters, played by Greg German and Nadia Dajani, will assume larger roles.

Fox is certainly giving the series a sterling shot at success, scheduling “Ned and Stacey” between two of its most popular shows, “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files.”

“I always wanted to be on Fox because I thought it was an edgy, vanguard attempt to program network television, and we are now being given the best shot that you can conceive of getting on this network,” Church said. “If we don’t deliver, if we don’t bridge that audience for those two shows, then we deserve to die.”

In an interview, Church doesn’t much err on the side of modesty. Unprompted, he grabs credit for coming up with many of the show’s directions and conceits, including this season’s biggest change--Ned enters into the muffin shop business with his arch-nemesis/sister-in-law (Dajani)--and he favorably compares his character to Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier, the centerpiece of the NBC sitcom that has won the Emmy for best comedy three years in a row.

“The show, and I think [executive producer] Michael [Weithorn] would agree with this, is very much designed around my sense of humor,” he said. “I remember in college, I read ‘On the Road,’ and there is this passage that Kerouac wrote: Never say unoriginal things and never have unoriginal thoughts. That always stuck with me, and that tome is what is critical with the character of Lowell [from “Wings”] and with the character of Ned. That’s the environment that I attempt to create on this television series--to be as edgy and funny and different as you can be. All I hope to do is turn a phrase, say a laugh line, that no one has ever heard before. I have a very improvisational style. It’s what I do. I just have a fun take on everything.”

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Church’s bravado is buoyed at least by the fact that his series outlasted “Partners,” the show from two hot producers--Jeff Greenstein and Jeff Strauss--who had just come off of “Friends” and signed a multimillion-dollar production deal. Fox paired it in an hour block with “Ned and Stacey” last year, but “Partners” was the show the network trumpeted most as the flagship for its new era of smart, NBC-like sitcoms.

“That didn’t frustrate me because, as the year went on, despite the low ratings, I knew that the network liked the show,” said Weithorn, who worked for many years on “Family Ties.” “It’s frustrating only in that you would love to be a hit right out of the box, but as long as we survive somehow in the scenario, I think slow and steady will be fine.”

The fate of the two shows bespeaks the lesson Fox learned.

“Our brand identity is so strong in the audience’s mind--that Fox is the place for something audacious, something more brazen, something more distinctive,” Greenblatt said. “ ‘Partners’ was distinctive to our network, but it was similar to a lot of things NBC had had success with. Our audience, we have found, only comes to us for something they can’t get anywhere else. ‘Ned and Stacey’ is more like that.”

* “Ned and Stacey” airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. on Channel 11.