‘The Rick’ Wants to Show He Knows the Score

As Mike O’Malley puts it, “The time to tell people the kind of show you want to do is not when you are drowning your sorrows in a bar when you are canceled.”

So O’Malley, not content with the creative quality of his new NBC sitcom, “The Mike O’Malley Show,” sat down and wrote what he wryly refers to as “the manifesto” to his writing staff--a document that surfaced several weeks ago and was soon heating up fax lines around town and making its way into various publications.

“Rather than assuming that everyone would understand the show I wanted to do, I thought I would give them some of the initial notes I made to myself regarding some of the characters’ philosophies that I had written down when I had gone in to pitch the show to NBC,” says O’Malley, the show’s creator as well as a writer, executive producer and star.

Probably best known for his role as the ultimate sports fanatic “The Rick” on ESPN’s popular commercials, O’Malley has a degree in theater from the University of New Hampshire and comes at television from a playwright’s point of view.

Two of his plays, “Three Years From Thirty” and “Diverting Devotion,” have been published by Samuel French and were performed off-off-Broadway. His latest play, “Searching for Certainty,” is set to debut off-Broadway next year.

His problem in getting the TV series where he thinks it should be comes, in part, from the dissonance between his professional roots in theater and “The Rick” persona that tends to have people thinking he’s just one step removed from an “Animal House” frame of mind.

“A lot of people misconstrue [“The Rick”],” he says. “They think I’m a stand-up comedian . . . [or] I’m just this guy on the ESPN commercials. They don’t understand that NBC had made a deal with me as an executive producer more because of my writing than acting.”

NBC executives, O’Malley says, have been very supportive of his desire to retool the show. “Why would NBC be upset that one of the executive producers of their new multimillion-dollar investment has an idea of the kind of show he wants to do?” O’Malley asks.

Executive producer Les Firestein (“In Living Color,” “The Drew Carey Show”), who created the series with O’Malley, says he and O’Malley were put together by the network because NBC thought they were a good mix.

“Mike has an incredible heart and I am brutally cynical,” Firestein says. “People figured we could make some kind of heartfelt and cynical show sandwich, which would be a good combination. I think we are getting there more and more. There are some really nice moments, but also a lot of funny in it.”

“What we set out to create,” O’Malley says, “was what kind of a role could I play best and do a variation on the kind of people I went to college with and hang out with in my own life and the questions and situations we find ourselves in.” Even so, he insists the comedy is not autobiographical: “But I think the issues the characters are dealing with [are].”

O’Malley already has a big fan base of young males because of “The Rick” spots, and he and Firestein hope to broaden it with the series. “Of course we want women to watch the show,” O’Malley says. “The cast is three men and three women. It’s split down the middle and we’re dealing with a lot of issues about their relationships. Since all the relationships are currently heterosexual, it involves women as much as it does men.”

In the comedy, O’Malley plays a 30-year-old fun-loving hockey fan who lives with his slacker friend, Weasel (Mark Rosenthal), in Gen-X-appropriate single-guy chaos.

All of that changes when Mike’s best friend, Jimmy (Will Arnett), decides to marry his soul mate (Kate Walsh), forcing Mike to think about becoming an adult.

During the course of each episode, O’Malley stops the action for a few minutes to talk things over with viewers.

“This is the last kind of guy who is going to be speaking about some of his questions and concerns out loud to his friends for fear of seeming less manly,” says O’Malley, who starred two years ago in the low-rated WB comedy “Life With Roger.” “But maybe he is really kind of hearing his thoughts out loud. Here is an opportunity, by breaking the fourth wall, to include the audience intimately with this guy’s journey.”

O’Malley is keenly aware of just how critical it is to the show’s survival that enough viewers decide to go along for that journey.

“It is completely a lot of pressure,” he acknowledges. “But that’s what they pay you for. There is an element of ‘OK. Your name is on it. If it succeeds, good for everyone.’ If it doesn’t, well, you know, bad for me.”