At Home in the Tube

Hopping behind the wheel of a golf cart, her surfboard strapped to the roof, Dottie Dartland winds down the narrow path leading from her Malibu home to the beach below. As she wriggles into her wetsuit, she insists surfing is less difficult than it looks.

“You just have to learn to move with the water,” she explains.

Dartland clearly knows how to catch a wave and ride it. She recently finished her second season as an executive producer of “Dharma & Greg,” the hit ABC comedy series she co-created with Chuck Lorre. Before that, she helped launch NBC’s more moderately successful sitcom “Caroline in the City.”

Along the way, Dartland has exhibited a knack for moving with the breaks life pitches her, demonstrated by the cross-country odyssey that brought her here. It’s a jagged path that began as an economics student at MIT, wound through Wall Street and somehow, remarkably, ended up on beachfront Malibu real estate, in an airy (and still sparsely furnished) house once owned by director Barry Levinson.

Lorre, who hired Dartland as a writer on the short-lived CBS sitcom “Frannie’s Turn” and subsequently gave her jobs on his more durable creations “Grace Under Fire” and “Cybill,” remembers watching Dartland surf not long after she took up the sport.

“She set out to do it and didn’t stop until she was very, very good. It’s a great insight into her character,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of determination there.”

That determination is underscored by Dartland’s decision to diminish her role on “Dharma” next season--even as ABC moves the show from Wednesdays to a key Tuesday night time slot--to focus on developing a new program, proving she can do so on her own.

That would be a milestone, especially given the dearth of female sitcom writers who oversee series as solo acts. Even some of the most influential female sitcom creators have been part of a team, including “Friends” and “Veronica’s Closet’s” Marta Kauffman (who works with David Crane and Kevin Bright) as well as Diane English (“Murphy Brown”) and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (“Designing Women”), who during those years worked with their spouses.

Some might be tempted to downplay Dartland’s ambition to join those ranks, wrapped up as it is in a beguiling package that wouldn’t appear out of place in front of the camera instead of behind it; still, based on the combination of skill and good fortune that brought her to this point, it might be ill-advised to bet against her.

Dartland, 35, grew up in Florida. Her father, Walter, is a consumer-affairs advocate and named her after a great aunt, who happens to be a nun. Graduating from MIT with a degree in economics, Dartland quickly landed a job on Wall Street working for Merrill Lynch.

“When I was in college, it was that time in the ‘80s when they were recruiting everyone to Wall Street firms, which was a lot of money if you were 21 years old,” she says. “They fly you to New York and they take you on these Circle Line cruises. I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do this.’ ”

Unfortunately, Dartland found the work “absolutely, mind-numbingly dull . . . I cried on the subway every morning, worked every weekend, Saturday and Sunday. That was like a badge of honor--like it was a contest to see how little of your life you could live.

“I was just at my wit’s end and really miserable, so I talked to my dad. He said, ‘Well, all right, we spent all this money putting you through school. Did you like anything?’ ”

MIT didn’t have a drama department, but Dartland had written and produced a one-act play as an extracurricular activity. Instead of accepting an associate’s job at her firm, she decided to quit, telling her employer that she planned to write plays.

“I remember my boss’ face. He said, ‘Like, Broadway plays? Do you do that?’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t, but I’m going to try to figure out how to do that.’ They were looking at me like I was out of my mind,” she recalls.

Dartland bought an old station wagon and drove from New York down to Florida, then across the United States. She wound through the Southwest, spent some time in Mexico and then headed up the West Coast--a journey that took nine months before ending in Seattle. She settled there, waiting tables at night so she could write by day.

Getting nowhere fast, Dartland applied to the graduate school in creative writing at UC Davis and received a full scholarship. It was there she met Carol Flint, a producer on the critically acclaimed ABC series “China Beach,” who came to her alma mater to speak about writing for television. The topic didn’t hold much interest for Dartland, who at that point had never seen a series script and didn’t own a TV.

“I wasn’t trying to schmooze for a job. I just went out to coffee with her because she was from Florida,” Dartland says.

Nevertheless, Flint called a few months later and offered Dartland an internship on “China Beach.” The producers ultimately kept her on full time as a researcher on the Vietnam-era drama.

“I was really having her follow in the footsteps I had taken a couple of years before that,” says Flint, currently a producer on “ER,” who got her start in similar fashion. “I was only two steps away from it myself. I loved her background, that she had worked on Wall Street. But basically, I loved her writing.”

Dartland sold a story to “China Beach” and began writing scripts for dramatic series, without much success. Switching to comedy, she landed work almost immediately. Lorre hired her on “Frannie’s Turn,” a 1992 CBS comedy starring Miriam Margolyes. When that show failed, she segued to “Grace” and “Cybill.”

Leaving the fold, Dartland was recruited to take part in revising “Caroline in the City,” a concept about an older woman with a younger man that changed dramatically when the show--initiated at CBS--shifted to NBC. Marco Pennette, one of the program’s creators, says Dartland brought a unique voice to the series, recalling a scene she added in which the title character and her friend seek to meet guys by dropping fruit out of their window.

Pennette also remembers anticipating someone a little different based on the name “Dottie.” “I expected my grandmother to walk in; instead, this funky girl in this great car drove up,” he says. “She truly is a free spirit, and she brought an incredible energy to the show. It’s great that she found a venue [in “Dharma”] to really go for it.”

After two years on “Caroline,” Dartland was eager to leave and signed a deal with Fox’s production arm. She had noticed Jenna Elfman, a co-star on ABC’s canceled Molly Ringwald comedy “Townies,” and was immediately interested when the studio began shopping Elfman around, seeking a writer to develop a show for her.

Lorre had seen the potential in Elfman as well, so the two decided to develop the series jointly. They created a program featuring the actress as Dharma, the free-spirited daughter of hippies, who impulsively marries Greg (Thomas Gibson), the uptight son of country-club blue bloods. According to Lorre, he had few misgivings about allowing a former employee to become his partner.

“I slowly learned if I could get my own ego out of the way and listen to what she had to say . . . her concerns were generally right on the money, and the script or the scene got better,” he says. “We did better work together than we did apart.”

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Because of Dartland’s fresh-off-the-beach looks and sunny disposition, some naturally assume she provided the voice of Dharma. The producers insist that isn’t the case, but Dartland is quick to embrace certain elements of the character.

“To me, Dharma is the best part of me, the freest part, the part where you trust your instincts,” she says. “Everything is yes. . . . Just because somebody is positive and optimistic, they don’t have to ditsy. It’s not dumb to be that way. It’s cool. You’re excited, you’re participating in life, and that takes so much more courage.”

It took a bit of courage, as well, for Dartland to begin surfing, which has grown into a consuming passion. Having pocketed some money from her association with “Caroline,” she traveled on her own to Australia and decided to give the sport a try.

Dartland now surfs daily, even naming her company 4 to 6 Foot Productions--terminology that refers to the height of waves. She relocated to Malibu in part, she says, because she had been hanging out there so much while living elsewhere, killing time between surfing forays.

“I thought, ‘I’m living in my truck,’ ” she says.

Dartland’s fiance, “Dharma” writer Eric Zicklin, has also felt compelled to take up surfing--a reasonably bold leap for a transplanted New Jersey native who once worked on “Late Show With David Letterman.” The two began dating after the show’s first season and have plans to marry this summer. As for surfing, Zicklin’s family is cool to his newfound hobby.

“His mom’s really nervous about it,” says Dartland, smiling broadly. “I took video of him in Nicaragua, up on his first wave.”

Despite the relative scarcity of female comedy writers, Dartland says she has seldom encountered impediments to writing because she is a woman. Indeed, she maintains the shortage of women has been to her advantage.

“They want women in the room,” she says. “That has worked for me. [But] it all comes down to what you can deliver.”

Another asset may have been the convoluted route Dartland followed to her current profession. Lorre, who knocked around as a musician for years before he began writing, sees obvious benefits stemming from experiencing life a little, rather than stumbling out of a college dorm into the sitcom world.

“It doesn’t hurt to have gotten kicked around for a few years,” he says. “I think it brings a little more insight to what we do. You can’t possibly take it for granted.”

“Someone once said, ‘You can’t write situation comedy from Brentwood,’ ” adds agent Norman Kurland, who represents both of the “Dharma” co-creators. “People do, but it’s a narrow view of life.”

After Dartland left “Caroline,” Lorre was instrumental in steering her to Kurland, encouraging her to leave the agent who championed her career in its early stages, Carole Bennett. While Dartland prefers not to discuss the situation, Bennett remains disappointed about the manner in which the shift was handled.

“She stayed at my house. Her family came for meals,” Bennett says. “I really took care of her. . . . I was pained when she left, because I loved her as a friend and a writer.”

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The question now is what Dartland can achieve on her own, in a business where the only commodity more scarce than writers with a hit series in them is one capable of capturing lightning in a bottle twice. Still, she won’t return to Dharma full time next year, content to serve as a consultant on the show while trying to fix upon that next concept.

Dartland concedes supervising a TV program entails skills that go beyond just turning out scripts. In terms of running a show, she says, “I have better training from waiting tables than from being a writer. At least that teaches you multi-tasking--this person needs this, and this has to go here. It has very little to do with being creative.”

Dartland adds that she has learned a great deal from watching how Lorre juggles not-always-welcome input from the network and studio with a vision of what he feels is best for his show.

“He’s brilliant at really sticking to his guns,” she says. “It’s a way of trying to hear notes [from the network] and incorporate them, and maintain the integrity of your project.”

Fox’s TV production arm, which produces “Dharma,” has gambled on Dartland to come up with another series, recently extending its agreement with her to create programs through the studio. While Fox would doubtless be happy to see her remain on “Dharma,” wanting to keep the show strong given the riches that await it in syndication, executives say they understand what is motivating her decision.

“The challenge of doing it by yourself always beckons,” says Sandy Grushow, president of 20th Century Fox Television.

Dartland admits to being both eager and a little scared to try navigating the prime-time waters alone--all the more reason, she says, to dive in and take the risk. What’s a little uncertainty, after all, to someone who has gotten this far without following some grand master plan?

“I look back at my 20s and I just floated through it,” she says. “I had really, really good luck, and I realize there are a lot of writers who don’t get those breaks. . . . I’m so lucky. But at least I know it.” *