‘SPIN CITY’ CAN’T WIN CITY HALL

When fictional deputy mayor Michael J. Fox wheels into his City Hall office in ABC’s sitcom “Spin City,” he’s pinned down in a blink by government gofers who plague him with every manner of pleas and paperwork.

His co-workers are inclined to fret en masse over his romantic misfortunes, and even the show’s lights-on-nobody’s-home mayor provides homespun love advice.

But in the real City Hall--the lower Manhattan landmark whose daily dramas loosely inspired the hit show--the weekly episodes come and go with scarcely a notice.

Hardly anyone, it seems, watches it anymore.

“I saw the first one, what do you call it, the pilot?” says Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who explained that his job doesn’t provide much leisure time for TV. “Maybe I’ve seen one more since then?”

“Around here, it’s ‘Seinfeld,’ ” says Michael Clendenin, the City Council’s chief spokesman, referring to the rival NBC comedy. As for “Spin City,” he says, “it hasn’t been a topic of conversation.”

“They could have made another ‘MASH,’ ” laments Deputy Mayor Fran Reiter. Instead, “It’s a joke.”

Here, where politics is life and vice versa, “Spin City” and its love-centric plots have failed to grip the imagination of the people it’s supposed to be depicting--the denizens of city government.

From the mayor’s office to City Council, staffers and lawmakers have a hard time reconciling the show with reality in the domed building that was a stage to mayors like Jimmy Walker and Edward I. Koch.

The show’s preoccupation with the romantic pitfalls of Fox’s witty but emotionally insecure deputy mayor trivialize the day-to-day work of government, they say. The bubbly mood of the show is closer to “Friends” or Fox’s old “Family Ties” than what one would find on a typical day at City Hall, a crisis-a-minute place with layers of complex, often racially tinged politics.

Fox’s boyish, telegenic looks and chipper demeanor don’t square with anyone in Giuliani’s front office, where there’s not a lot of laughter.

“What’s most fascinating in politics is not what happens in the bedrooms but what happens in the meeting rooms and decision rooms,” says Lee Jones, who’s worked under two mayors and now is a senior adviser to the Manhattan borough president.

The show “misses the point of politics. The more interesting subjects are outside the bedroom--who rises to power, how one uses power, how one falls from power,” he says.

Needless to say, he’s not a regular watcher.

There’s some things that just wouldn’t happen. Fox, as Deputy Mayor Michael Flaherty, moves an air-hockey board game into a back office. A trip to see the Rangers, maybe. An arcade at City Hall, no.

Kevin R. McCabe, chief of staff to City Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone, suggested that some of his collegues may be taking “Spin City” too seriously.

“The show is not meant for us. ‘Barney Miller’ was not meant for cops. That’s the context of it, but you’re playing to broader audiences,” says McCabe, who has informally advised Fox and the show’s producers.

“Spin City” airs Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. on ABC.