Master of This Domain

“Why am I doing this--is that your question?” Michael Richards asks, sounding a tad prickly. The subject is “The Michael Richards Show,” debuting on NBC Oct. 24 and airing Tuesday nights at 8 thereafter. But Richards is correct to detect a more probing topic, as in: Why weren’t those nine seasons of genius and money, otherwise known as “Seinfeld,” enough?

Richards is eating lunch in his office on the CBS-Radford lot in Studio City. He offers half of his sandwich, some napkins, and says of his career and his new sitcom: “I tried to run away from it. At first I didn’t really want to work. There wasn’t anything that was really exciting me. So I thought I was going to retire.”

During his last season playing Kramer on “Seinfeld,” Richards made around $13 million, according to published reports. When the show ended, he traveled and restored his Pacific Palisades home, an Italian Mediterranean house overlooking the ocean and built in the 1920s by the late architect Paul Williams. He read the classics (Melville, Thoreau, Washington Irving) and let go of his agents, he says. He took a role as Micawber in a TNT production of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” but Richards, 51, also says he turned down prominent roles on stage, in ongoing productions of “Art” and “Wait Until Dark.”

Instead, he explored Arizona, New Mexico and California’s Sierra range. “I was taking stock in American culture, just realizing what a great country this is,” Richards says. He was also looking for land, to build a retreat of some kind. And he wrote stuff down--thoughts, moods, a kind of journal writing.

“I was fascinated with Whitman’s ‘Specimen Days,’ ” he says. “It’s an account of his feelings each day. I liked the way he put his thoughts together. Very simple, straightforward.”

On “The Michael Richards Show,” Richards plays Vic Nardozza, a comically befuddled detective in the way of Inspector Clouseau. This is, he says, a part he’s been wanting to play for some time. On the new show there is a boss and a sidekick and some office eccentrics. But it remains to be seen whether the cast will gel around Richards or how badly he will need them.

For months now, too, there have been mixed messages trickling out about the show, much of them centered on the pilot that Richards and his three executive producers (Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Gregg Kavet, all former “Seinfeld” staffers) made and then trashed. Filmed on location as a single-camera prototype, the pilot was either terrible or lacked an ensemble cast or was too laborious to make, depending on whom you talk to, and was thrown out, at a cost of more than $1 million. In comedy development, pilots sometimes get scrapped. But in the shorthand way these situations get translated in the television industry, “The Michael Richards Show” officially became a “troubled” project, a sitcom with a big name attached but creatively adrift--a theme driven home by television writers denied a screening of the show when the networks convened in Pasadena over the summer to promote their fall lineups.

In a season when each of the big four networks has a name actor headlining a sitcom (of Richards, Bette Midler, Geena Davis and John Goodman, only Goodman didn’t name his Fox show after himself), Richards may be wearing the biggest target on his back.

“We have been wallowing in the bad press,” executive producer Feresten says jokingly, interviewed recently in his office. During the conversation, the phone rings; it’s Jerry Seinfeld. Feresten leaves the room to take the call, leaving Kavet and Robin to deal with the “Are you in trouble?” questions. Both Harvard graduates and barely in their 30s, they don’t seem overwhelmed by the pressures, even though this is the first time they’ve run a show and they’ve been made to feel that certain network executives’ jobs are riding on their work. But the writers have earned a measure of relief after shooting the second pilot, with a more conventional sitcom look--a live audience, four cameras, and an ensemble cast that includes William Devane, Tim Meadows, Amy Farrington and Bill Cobbs.

“It’s a new experience for all of us, for Michael included,” Robin says. “All the attention is making that rough. We’d love to be tucked away and hidden for a couple years and let the show evolve, but we’re not going to have that shot. So we’re trying to rise to the occasion.”

You can compare “The Michael Richards Show” to “Get Smart” or a Peter Sellers-Clouseau movie--the writers can’t commit to any analogy. They bring up a 10-year-old failed NBC pilot called “Lookwell,” written by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel, a single-camera comedy starring Adam West as a TV detective whose show is canceled but who still believes he can solve cases. The pilot was passed along to the writers by Rick Ludwin, NBC’s senior vice president in charge of late-night programming and the network executive who, a decade ago, championed “Seinfeld” when most at NBC thought the show was dead on arrival. Ludwin felt “Lookwell” had had enormous potential but demonstrated what can happen when TV comedy writers dabble in detective characters and get mired in mystery plots that are outside their expertise. “I said, ‘Take a look at this and don’t do it,’ ” Ludwin says of his advice to the “Michael Richards Show” writers.

The writers say their show will emphasize character over capers. One scene cut from the pilot nevertheless demonstrates the spirit of the show: Nardozza tries to follow a guy out of a restaurant but loses him because the waitress is slow to bring his check.

*

What remains to be seen is whether viewers will embrace Richards not only as a sitcom lead, but as someone who resembles Kramer but isn’t Kramer--a character still seen up to six times a week in many markets thanks to “Seinfeld’s” popularity in syndication. Two TV seasons removed from the end of “Seinfeld,” Richards is the first among the four main players to jump back into the sitcom waters; Jason Alexander, who has a development deal at 20th Century Fox Television, could follow in seasons to come. Seinfeld, meanwhile, has gone back into clubs and is working toward a new stand-up tour. There was a glimpse of his own attitude about returning to prime time at the 1999 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., when, at a “Seinfeld” retrospective, he was asked by moderator Bob Costas about doing another sitcom.

“Would you want to follow that?” Seinfeld asked. “Would you? Would anybody? I don’t want to follow it.”

But “Seinfeld” wasn’t named after Michael Richards. And Richards chooses to put the challenges awaiting him this way: “Audiences will tune into this show for the laugh. If it’s not there, they’ll go elsewhere.”

“The public will allow you to do anything as long as it’s good,” agrees Henry Winkler, who, after playing Fonzie for 10 years on “Happy Days,” returned to series TV as Monty Richardson, conservative talk-show host, in the 1994 Fox sitcom “Monty.” The series lasted one month.

“Just from the promos that I saw, it looks to me like they’re using the best parts of Michael,” says Winkler, a producer and actor. “There are very few physical comedians in America like him.”

For NBC, there are reasons to handle “The Michael Richards Show” with care, and not just because the network has a 13-episode guarantee with Richards. Initial tune-in, given the thriving popularity of “Seinfeld,” is expected to be high.

“The research is telling us [that] people want to see Michael back on television, but in an established franchise with a strong ensemble cast,” says NBC Entertainment President Garth Ancier.

“If he were unknown and then went back and retooled it, we would have much lower expectations,” says Stacey Lynn Koerner, vice president of broadcast research at TN Media, which consults advertisers on prime-time programming. Still, she adds, “whatever he does, he’s Kramer. . . . It will be difficult for viewers not to be making comparisons.”

Based on the first episode and NBC promos, it is clear that Richards is calling on some of the vocal inflections, facial expressions and moves he used to make Kramer outsized and beloved on “Seinfeld.”

“It’s not a complete breakaway from [Kramer]. It’s not so abrupt, but yet [the audience will] know too that I’m not the Kramer character,” Richards says. “I am Vic Nardozza.

“I like that each week you can see this guy involved in the lives of different people--coming into their lives quite intimately, in that he’s an investigator. Those were the things that I loved the most when I did ‘Seinfeld,’ was when Kramer would go undercover. Remember? He would go undercover a little bit.”

*

Richards himself was somewhat incognito pre-”Seinfeld.” A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, he spent a decade-plus doing guest shots on prime-time dramas and sitcoms, earning a good living on the margins of TV stardom. Comedy was in his blood--he was a cast member of the ABC sketch comedy series “Fridays,” which ran from 1980 to 1982, and he played a wacky gardener in the 1987 syndicated sitcom “Marblehead Manor.”

Marc Hirschfeld, then an independent casting director, brought in Richards to read for the Al Bundy part on Fox’s “Married . . . With Children”; not long afterward, Richards would again read for Hirschfeld, this time when he was casting the underdog pilot “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” which in 1989 inspired so little confidence that then-NBC President Brandon Tartikoff ordered four episodes, to be broadcast in the summer of 1990.

On “Seinfeld,” Richards was to play Kramer as a jobless recluse living across the hall. For a time he did this, but as Kramer’s hair rose, so did Richards’ comedic experimentation. In “Seinfeld’s” latter seasons, he created a character so convincingly wacky that Kramer could don any number of life disguises--as when he redecorates his apartment with the discarded set of “The Merv Griffin Show” and takes on the persona of a talk show host.

Richards, known to stay in character during filming, traces Kramer’s evolution to his decision to have Kramer burst into Jerry’s apartment at full speed, “like he was going into life. “That opened up the extrovert in Kramer. It was that optimism that the audience enjoyed. . . . This guy can get into a lot of life,” Richards adds, speaking now of Nardozza and not Kramer. “That’s important for me when I make a commitment to a character in making comedy. That’s the first thing I ask myself. When I was talking with the guys and we decided we were going to go with this kind of concept, [I wanted to know], can this guy really get involved with life?”

“The Michael Richards Show” won’t debut for another six weeks, its launch delayed by scheduling conflicts at NBC, Ancier says. By then, critics will have seen the revamped pilot and begun weighing in on the show’s chances. It’s a kind of deja vu all over again for some of the show’s senior management, including three who were around when “The Seinfeld Chronicles” was a show in search of itself: Glen Padnick, president of Castle Rock Television, whose studio is producing “The Michael Richards Show” with Warner Bros. Television; NBC’s Ludwin; and Richards himself.

By the end of the “Seinfeld” run, Richards had created a character so ineffable he was getting what TV writers call “free laughs,” meaning Kramer’s presence, more than the lines writers fed him, were responsible for the audience’s response. Apparently, it was enough to make an actor wonder what would happen if he were the guy whose name was in the title.