Ignore the Ratings (and the Spelling)

Overlooked, but not overcooked.

One of television’s best-kept secrets is the WB comedy “Alright Already,” which is about an unmarried optometrist who tenuously coexists in South Beach, Fla., with her retired parents and younger sister and brother.

In the premiere, Carol Lerner (Carol Leifer) couldn’t make her neighbors stop playing loud music. So she resorted to the guilt strategy, pretending she had a newborn baby.

Funny!

In another episode, her sister (Stacy Galina) somehow skipped middle age and began a mind meld with their older parents (Mitzi McCall and Jerry Adler), from which she has never recovered.

Hilarious!

Still another episode found Carol’s mother and sister locked in mortal mah-jongg combat, and Carol devastating her emotionally fragile bottled water man by switching to another company.

Hilarious!

“Alright Already” is too good to be ignored.

Of course, that toddler WB itself is pretty much a secret, averaging a bit more than 4 million viewers per hour in its third season of life, making it the least watched of the six commercial networks and a difficult arena in which to nurture a hit at 9:30 p.m. Sunday nights with not much of a lead-in.

“My dream is to see the show go all the way [in the ratings] to No. 78,” Leifer, the show’s gifted star and creator, joked at a meeting of advertisers in May. “They laughed,” Leifer recalled recently, “and said that would be phenomenal.”

It hasn’t reached even that low rung yet, however, ranking just 112th among 114 prime-time programs in the latest Nielsen ratings, its audience of 3.3 million being a level of exposure that print writers rarely even approach, but one that equals “nobody’s watching” in the populous viewer universe of prime time.

Which is a shame, for although uneven (Sunday’s episode is so-so, for example) and misspelled (it should be “All Right Already”), Leifer’s series has loads of promise, and at its best is as funny as any sitcom on the air, at times resonating a bit like NBC’s great “Seinfeld.”

No surprise, as Leifer, a 41-year-old stand-up comic, spent three years writing for “Seinfeld,” ultimately rising to producer, and crafted several of that sitcom’s funniest episodes. One from 1995, titled “The Rye,” aired recently in syndicated reruns:

Jerry robs an old lady of a marble rye bread that an embarrassed George then tries to sneak into the apartment of his girlfriend’s parents to replace the one his own parents brought there as a gift, then left with after their hosts didn’t serve it during dinner. Elaine falls for a jazz musician who can’t play his sax after giving oral sex. Kramer moonlights driving a hansom cab whose horse he feeds some of the bulk load of Beef-a-Reeno he bought at the Price Club, giving the animal severe gas that nearly asphyxiates Kramer and his passengers--the parents of George’s girlfriend.

You know . . . routine TV.

With Leifer behind it, “Alright Already” itself just feels like an NBC series, and you can envision it, for example, doing at least as well in the ratings as the struggling gal comedies in that network’s lagging Monday night sitcom bloc.

Leifer first pitched her series to NBC, which turned it down. “And I’m a good pitcher,” she said by phone from her set. “I’m used to the 11 o’clock [show in clubs] on Friday nights when you have to give 100% ‘cause everyone’s drunk. So four guys in suits who are sober are not hard for me.”

After NBC’s suits rejected “Alright Already,” Leifer took it to WB, whose suits were immediately enthusiastic, she said. And only recently her series was picked up by WB for the entire season and granted a new lead-in, with “Unhappily Ever After” supplanting “The Tom Show” at 9 p.m.

“I didn’t roll off the tomato truck yesterday,” Leifer said. “So this is really thrilling for me to do something I’ve wanted for 20 years. I’ve seen the other side, too. I’ve seen great comedians who have a shot at having a show, and it fell apart because the staff fell apart or the executive producer didn’t have his voice. But I’m getting to do the show I set out to do every week. The show feels a lot like me with my relatives.” (Her brother is played by Maury Sterling; also prominent is Amy Yasbeck as her best friend.)

An ugly question:

What is it like being executive producer (with Stephen Engel and Brad Grey) of one of the least-watched shows in prime time after serving on one of the most popular and celebrated ones (separated by a brief writing and producing stint on HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show”)?

“The giant difference,” Leifer said, reframing the question, “is between working on a hit and a new show. On ‘Seinfeld,’ the network and the studio were not involved with what you were doing. Here I deal every week with notes from Brillstein-Grey [Communications],” the show’s production company.

Take the oral sex component of “The Rye” episode from “Seinfeld,” for example. “There was never any discussion about . . . can we do that?” Leifer said. “On my new show, that subject would entail discussions with about 20 people. Right there, that’s very different.”

Nevertheless, said Leifer, an advantage of being on a young, struggling network with nowhere to go but up is that “they’re not looking [at the show’s ratings] every week and scrambling in a panic.”

And what about those anorexic ratings? “Look,” Leifer said, “would I love more viewers? Who wouldn’t want more viewers? Who wouldn’t want to be between [NBC’s] ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’? I also wish I was 5-11 and leggy. But these are not the cards I was dealt. I need to focus on what I can control--the work product. The ratings and demographics I can’t control.”

Nor the ongoing speculation about Leifer (who once dated Seinfeld and remains a friend) being the basis for the Julia Louis-Dreyfus character, Elaine, who is Jerry’s close pal and former girlfriend in “Seinfeld.” “This really snowballed, created a life of its own and is way overblown,” is Leifer’s response.

One more question: Why is the “Alright” in her show’s title misspelled? Leifer sounded surprised that anyone would bring it up. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’ve been spelling it wrong all this time.” WB executives, too, apparently.

Go figure, already.

* “Alright Already” airs Sundays at 9:30 p.m. on WB (Channel 5).