Northeastern Exposure

For a guy with the big title, the office doesn’t have much of a view. Even on the sunniest of days, Rob Burnett looks out of his ground-floor window onto a cinder-block wall painted several shades of dirty beige. It’s certainly not Broadway, which is where Burnett has resided the last four years as executive producer of “The Late Show With David Letterman.”

But for now, Burnett is taking leave from his daily “Letterman” duties and is the creator and executive producer of “Ed,” a critically embraced new hour comedy-drama that Times television critic Howard Rosenberg described as “a warm, tender, funny, smart brand of storytelling that potentially may lift this series high into the stratosphere of elite television.” It drew an estimated 16.46 million people to its season premiere earlier this month.

“Ed” is the first major network series in recent memory to be shot primarily in the leafy suburban towns of Bergen County, just across the Hudson River from New York. “I am not scared to be quoted saying that I love New Jersey,” says Burnett, in almost Lettermanic deadpan.

He is sitting in his spare office, dotted mostly with videotapes, scripts and an eclectic array of relatively healthy snacks--Diet Coke, Diet A&W; Rootbeer, Fiber One cereal. He says, though, that he is becoming partial to the doughnuts from Trautwein’s farm market in nearby Closter. “Yes, I love New Jersey,” he sighs.

While Letterman, whose Worldwide Pants production company produces “Ed,” mostly inhabits high-end 5th Avenue suits, Burnett is comfortable in the “Ed” offices and on the set across Paris Avenue in a Jerseyfied shorts and T-shirt ensemble.

That is appropriate since “Ed” tells the story of a New York lawyer fired from his firm for forgetting a comma in a 500-page brief. (Unfortunately, that lost comma cost the firm nearly $2 million in a case.) In addition, Ed’s wife left him for an allegedly better man--the mailman.

So Ed (played by previously unknown actor Tom Cavanagh) heads back to his small hometown of Stuckeyville, Ohio, where he spent the best years of his life. He’s out to woo the girl he had a crush on--but never dated--in high school, and in the process finds joy in buying the town’s old bowling alley and moving in with his best buddy, a doctor, and his beautiful wife and new baby.

To re-create all this uplifting wonderment, Burnett and his crew have taken over the defunct Country Club Lanes on Paris Avenue, just off the main shopping strip in this small village just south of the New York state border. Sixteen of the old AMF automatic lanes in the vintage 1950s alley are now the Stuckey Bowl, while the crew has outfitted the rest of the building for stage sets.

Outdoor scenes are being shot in the close-by towns of Westwood, Ridgewood, Norwood and Old Tappan in Bergen County and at Montclair High School in Essex County. The Runcible Spoon restaurant in nearby Nyack, N.Y., doubles as the pie shop where Ed and his buddies hang out, and Joel’s in Ridgewood, N.J., plays their favorite coffeehouse. Yet all of these towns are stand-ins for a vague Midwestern feel that Burnett wants for “Ed,” in the same way Washington state played Alaska and its sensibility for “Northern Exposure.”

“We want people to hear the cicadas chirping and the branches bending in the breeze,” says Burnett, not altogether sardonically. “It’s amazing how Midwestern New Jersey can feel, and we want that kind of feeling through the show.”

Burnett also wouldn’t mind the cult status that “Northern Exposure” had in its heyday, because he hopes that “Ed” has that same texture.

“This is definitely not a sitcom,” he says. “There are few zingy one-liners and there is a definite dramatic element. We want it to be funny, sure, but there is a story to it. It’s a humorous drama and there are very few of them. I guess I’d have to say that either people will really like it or I will be asked to leave television forever.”

That is unlikely, since Burnett is keeping close ties to Letterman. He has been careful not to steal any writers from “The Late Show” and spends part of his 18-hour days in touch with that show’s staff.

But for the next several months--and pending success in the ratings, the upcoming years--Northvale and the old bowling alley, with its kitschy light turquoise and off-white interior, will be the primary home for Burnett and “Ed.”

“I think this will mean great things for the Greek restaurant around the corner,” says Burnett of the Greek Village on Livingston Street. “Especially if they keep filling me up with their souvlaki.”

“Ed” was originally created for CBS, and even though Burnett’s producing partner is Viacom, which now owns CBS, the network passed on it and let it go to NBC.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, a Jersey-born boy himself, was in a deal with Worldwide Pants at the time the company was developing the show, then dubbed “Stuckeyville.” Despite Cavanagh’s striking resemblance to Stewart, Burnett would not comment on whether the comic was the first choice for the lead. In any case, the curly-haired Cavanagh, is taller (at about 5-foot-11) and a bit more Midwestern in style than the diminutive and slyly Eastern Stewart--making him more “Ed”-like in the end.

“The whole idea of this show is that no matter how successful you can become, sometimes your more affecting days are when you were in high school,” says Burnett. “You remember the freedom, even if that is elusive. So you buy the bowling alley and go headlong after the pretty girl.”

For his part, Northvale Mayor John E. Rooney loves that his otherwise sleepy town might become a cult visiting spot. He is nostalgic about Country Club Lanes, where he used to bowl, but he is pleased at the way the “Ed” crew has gussied up the place.

“They have made all the space really usable and maybe, even when the show is finished, we’ll be able to have that rented out as a studio,” says Rooney, who is also a Republican state assemblyman from the district. “We love good, clean industry here and they have been very good to us, buying from local businesses and hiring local tradespeople.”

Rooney’s daughter, Beth, is a stage manager for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” so he says he is well aware of the needs of the TV business. But he declined, anyway, to take an offered bit part in “Ed.”

“I was in Providence recently and the mayor there has appeared in [the NBC drama] ‘Providence.’ He loves it, but I don’t think it’s for me,” says Rooney, though he lamented being on vacation when the “Ed” set opened and he was asked to throw out the first bowling ball.

But New Jersey is for Burnett. He grew up in North Caldwell and went to West Essex High School. He wanted to produce a TV series, but he lamented the idea that most are made in Southern California, far away from his current Manhattan home. He searched for producing partners who would allow him to do the show in the East, and Viacom offered to team up with Worldwide Pants to do so. Most shows that shoot in the East tend to opt for a backdrop of Manhattan (“Spin City,” “Law and Order”) or travel only as far as sound stages in Queens (“Sesame Street” and “The Cosby Show” before it ended). Yet Burnett wanted a feel he couldn’t get in the city itself--especially since Stuckeyville is in an anywhere-U.S.A. setting.

“Ironically, many of the towns in North Jersey have that Midwestern look we were looking for,” says Kathy Ciric, “Ed’s” location manager. “Northvale especially has a lot of buildings from the 1920s and a little later, which is great for us. There are no Kmarts and, on the other hand, not all that many Victorians.”

Outside of Northvale, Ciric has found other venues she loves. Ridgewood’s town square has a Midwestern feel, she says, and Montclair High School, in the town that is home to many actors (Olympia Dukakis and Joe Morton among them) has “a gorgeous campus. It looks like an idealized 1950s, which is important since Ed wants to drift back to his idealized past.”

The house Ed lives in with his friends is a couple of miles north of Northvale in the town of Old Tappan.

“It has a lemonade porch with a wonderful overhang and a rail around it,” Ciric says. “You just can’t resist sitting on that porch and rocking the day away.”

Of course, HBO’s “The Sopranos” has put its own spin on North Jersey scenery, which the “Ed” folks appreciate but won’t emulate. “We are not looking for gritty, like ‘Sopranos,’ ” says Burnett. “We’ll have that other New Jersey--the one no one seems to know.” It is important for the “Ed” crew to stay within 30 miles of Manhattan, says supervising producer Kathy McGill, since union rules require extra travel payments if shooting is farther away.

“And, God willing, we will still be shooting in the winter,” she says. “There is a richness to that you don’t find in sunny California. And we think that will enhance the show.”

Burnett says the scripts, too, are infused with a New Jersey feeling, even if Stuckeyville is not in that particular state.

“When I write, I’m thinking the North Caldwell of my teenage years,” he says. “It’s a New Jersey that is good looking, that is a great place to be. Those people who think otherwise, well, they have probably just been on the turnpike, so they just don’t know. It’s a place where you can smell the trees at night and listen to those cicadas.”

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“Ed” can be seen Sundays at 8 p.m. on NBC.