Putting in Double Time on TV Pays Off

If you watch enough TV, so your mother always told you, your vision is likely to turn a bit blurry. But this network prime-time season, tube-aholics might be rubbing their eyes more than normal and thinking, “Didn’t I see him somewhere before?”

In unprecedented numbers, actors and actresses are doubling up this season. More and more are playing different recurring characters on network sitcoms and dramas.

There’s Paige Turco, for example, as the pregnant lesbian cop Abby on “NYPD Blue” and the recovering alcoholic Annie on “Party of Five.”

In another kind of crossover, Kathy Najimy is the voice of Peggy in the animated “King of the Hill” and, with her whole self, plays the right-hand woman on “Veronica’s Closet.” Her “Closet” cohort, Wallace Langham, also plays a writer on “The Larry Sanders Show.”

No fewer than four recurring “ER” characters have been similarly recurring in other network shows.

And then there’s the most irrepressible recurrer of them all, Wayne Knight, who has added the lovesick Officer Don on “3rd Rock From the Sun” to his “Seinfeld” role as postman Newman or, maybe more correctly, NEWMAN!!!

“If I die tomorrow, it’s likely that my obit headline will be ‘Newman Kicks the Bucket,’ ” Knight said. “Hopefully, the goal is to be a character actor and move on, but certainly when you do something as popular as ‘Seinfeld’ is, you doubt that you will ever do anything equally popular.”

Knight signed a development deal in 1997 with the Carsey-Werner production company, reported to be $2 million over three years. Coincidentally, he said, he was walking around the CBS lot in Studio City when he crossed paths with Terry and Bonnie Turner, the creators of “3rd Rock,” a Carsey-Werner show.

“They said, ‘We need a love interest for Sally,’ and it was going to be a one-time thing,” he said. “But then there was that old bugaboo, chemistry, so it’s kept going.”

“They say when it rains, it pours,” said Turco, who is in her second season as a recurring character on “NYPD Blue” and has been a contract supporting player since the fall on “Party of Five.”

“I think as a general rule, work generates work. People see you and see your work when you are on a show. Maybe you are no more or less desirable, but you are out there, and people are reminded that you exist.”

Yvette Freeman is one of the four “ER” folks who have been on other prime-time shows this season. Freeman plays the sympathetic nurse Haleh Adams on “ER” and the uptight and officious office manager Evelyn Smalley on the new NBC sitcom “Working.”

“My characters are completely different, so I don’t worry about confusing them,” said Freeman, who is also rehearsing a show based on the life of singer Dinah Washington that will open off-Broadway on March 26. “And who could give up working on ‘ER,’ the most popular show on TV?”

She said she was most disappointed not to be on the live season-premiere episode of “ER,” but she couldn’t break away from shooting on location with “Working,” where her role is somewhat bigger.

“In a lot of ways, this is a preferable way to do things,” she said. “You come to one or the other and you are fresh. It’s a little extra challenge. And the people on ‘ER’ are supportive of everyone doing more work.”

It would seem that the honchos at “ER” would be most likely to ditch folks who didn’t want to work exclusively on the medical drama. After all, being No. 1 should carry with it some swagger. But it appears just the opposite is true. Freeman was joined on double-shifting this season by Lisa Nicole Carson (the mother of Dr. Benton’s baby and Ally’s roommate on Fox’s “Ally McBeal”), Khandi Alexander (Benton’s sister, Jackie, and, until she left recently, Catherine on “NewsRadio”) and Abe Benrubi (Jerry, the intake guy, on “ER” and a dream researcher on the short-lived “Sleepwalkers”).

“We do it because it’s good to let people work,” said “ER” executive producer Lydia Woodward. “We like to get good actors working. We do bend over backward to accommodate them, and it’s been worth it. The way you get good people is not setting up a system where you prevent them from working in another place but finding the best people and making everything fit.”

Woodward said that because “ER” has many recurring characters, accommodation tends to be easier. It’s also less difficult to do so when the actors are in two dramas, rather than in sitcoms.

“Yvette is in a sitcom, so she mostly comes in when she is on hiatus from ‘Working.’ That is harder to do,” Woodward said. “The way sitcoms work is they rehearse all week long, where in a drama, you may be in one scene on one show on a Monday and a Tuesday and be available in the other one on Wednesday and Thursday.”

Woodward said the “ER” double-dippers acknowledge that they have been able to get extra work because of their exposure on the top-rated drama on network television.

“ ‘ER’ has been very good for all our careers,” she said. “We have all been in demand because of this show’s success.”

A spokeswoman for the Screen Actors Guild said there was little objection to members taking up more than one network acting slot. “Work is good,” she said. “And you never know when your role, especially a recurring one, will end, so few people will rue you getting an extra part.”

The pay for these extra roles goes from a few thousand dollars an episode for some of the less well-known actors to a reported $55,000 to $60,000 for a “Seinfeld” episode for Knight, who also has been active in movies of late (“Jurassic Park,” “Space Jam,” “For Richer or Poorer”).

Prime-time twofers, though not as common as during this season, have existed in TV seasons past. In the early 1960s, Richard Deacon played Fred Rutherford, Lumpy’s father, on “Leave It to Beaver” and Mel Cooley on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Robert Reed was Lt. Adam Tobias on “Mannix” and Dad Mike on “The Brady Bunch” from 1969 to ’74. And Heather Locklear was Sammy Jo Dean on “Dynasty” (1981 to ‘89), while also playing Officer Stacy Sheridan on “T.J. Hooker” (1982 to ‘87).

In recent years, Yeardly Smith and Hank Azaria both did “The Simpsons” voices while appearing as characters on “Herman’s Head.” And Lisa Kudrow has continued playing ditsy waitress Ursula on “Mad About You” while co-starring as ditsy roommate Phoebe on “Friends.”

Actually, this season, Knight is less ubiquitous in prime-time cast sheets than he was in the fall of 1993, when, in addition to Newman, he appeared as Froggy in the small-town football drama “Against the Grain” and as Robert Piccolo, John Mendoza’s sports editor, in “Second Half.” Neither show made it into the winter.

“I don’t get a lot of people coming up to me and yelling, ‘FROGGY!’ ” said Knight, who savors his good fortune.

“You know, you go in to audition for something and it becomes a recurring character. The next thing you know, everyone wants you at the same time. I always loved doing repertory as an actor, so this is a wonderful thing,” he said. “And to be on these two shows, Wow! You sit at the table and someone puts down a really funny script and you go home feeling clean at the end of the day.

“I have the luxury of, in essence, riding two of the great cruise ships of today’s television. I may not steer it, but I am eating luxuriously from the buffet,” Knight said. “And you never know; 10 years from now, someone may yell, ‘NEWMAN!!!’ at me and I’ll be in a gutter sipping Woolite. It’s a funny business, and you don’t want to fight any success you have in it.”