Fitting Square Pegs in an Oval Office

In 1997, Comedy Central took a chance on a cheap-looking cartoon called “South Park,” and the result was phenomenal. The lowbrow follies of Kenny, Cartman, Kyle and Stan delivered Comedy Central its first breakout hit, driving unprecedented traffic to the channel and giving a still-fledgling cable outpost brand identity--not to mention a lucrative merchandising tool.

“South Park,” which is still Comedy Central’s highest-rated show, averaging 2.3 million viewers, also elevated its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, to hit-maker status. Parker, 31, and Stone, 29, subsequently turned “South Park” into a winning feature film, (“South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut”) and could have taken their reputation to network television. But ultimately they decided to keep their sensibilities on cable.

Which brings us to “That’s My Bush!”

The live-action series, which debuts tonight at 10:30 on Comedy Central (after “South Park”), stars Timothy Bottoms as President George W. Bush and Carrie Quinn Dolin as First Lady Laura Bush. As Parker and Stone have been taking pains to establish in the full-court press of publicity, “That’s My Bush!” is less a sendup of the newly configured White House than a spoof of the “anything-can-happen-and-usually-does” high jinks typical of sitcoms (it was originally to be called “Family First,” but there was a potential conflict with the Mormon Church, which also uses that title for programming, Comedy Central says).

“People think that it’s going to be a 23-minute-long ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch,” says Parker, interviewed in the “That’s My Bush!” offices on the Sony lot. “What we’re really trying to do is a sitcom, the most subversive sitcom ever made.”

Yes, the main character in “That’s My Bush!” occupies the highest office in the land, but Stone and Parker express far more vitriol for the American sitcom than the American president.

In the process, they have filled out their cast of characters with a just-add-water approach. There’s the sassy housekeeper (Marcia Wallace), the put-upon straight man (Kurt Fuller, playing Bush advisor Karl Rove), the nosy neighbor and the cute blond.

Equally essential to the show’s intentionally sophomoric tone, though, are all the sound cues--the things that, in the sorry world of bad network comedy, implore us to join in on the fun. This includes the over-amped laugh track and hoots from the audience (though “That’s My Bush!” has no studio audience). And then there’s the catch phrase, lovingly spoken by Bush to his wife: “One of these days, I’m gonna punch you in the face!” “That’s My Bush!,” then, is a thumb in the eye of TV sitcom history. The show’s future, it seems, will depend on whether the characters become more than stick-figure setups for broad jokes. Can “That’s My Bush!” sustain itself once the satirical novelties wear off?

To that end, Bottoms may be the show’s best hope for longevity. His Bush isn’t an impression, it’s an embodiment--the president re-imagined as a slightly dense but lovable and well-meaning sitcom husband. There were, at one point, to be two Bush daughters portrayed as lesbians, but they were excised at Comedy Central’s insistence. Parker and Stone, for their part, say they didn’t need the characters anyway.

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Instead, they feel they have a main character people can embrace, even though, as it happens, he is not someone who won the popular vote. “Our George Bush is a great guy, because that’s the American sitcom,” says Parker. “Your main character has to be someone who, even if he has his faults . . . [the audience can] get into.”

This is the first live-action TV show Parker and Stone have attempted, and it reflects the point of view of two guys whose comedy is rooted in lampooning the status quo, whether that’s professional sports (the 1998 feature “BASEketball”) or the cartoon musical (the 1999 “South Park” movie). “If you want to learn the form of something, parody is almost the quickest way to learn,” says Stone. “The only way to understand a sitcom is to make fun of it. The door we go through to learn is parody.”

Politics, adds Stone, “always takes a back seat to the sitcom story. It’s what did George Bush’s experience with gun control teach him about trusting his friends. . . . Those things service the personal story.”

In the premiere episode tonight, President Bush juggles a long-ago-promised dinner date with his wife and a conflicting dinner set up between leaders on both sides of the abortion debate. He runs back and forth between engagements, trying to be in two places at once while concealing his dilemma. On the one hand, this is a boilerplate sitcom premise (see “Three’s Company,” any season). But in keeping with their brand of humor, Parker and Stone, who turned Satan into Saddam Hussein’s sex toy in their “South Park” movie, make the anti-abortion chief a talking, adult male fetus.

Parker and Stone, it may help to know, are not overly political beings. Parker says he’s a registered Libertarian while Stone says, as if not entirely sure himself: “I don’t think I’m registered to vote.”

But they are passionate about their outsider status in Hollywood. By the time Parker and Stone signed a three-year deal with Comedy Central last June, they had made the rounds of the broadcast networks. They describe these meetings as predictably fruitless. Parker and Stone came close to signing a deal at NBC, they say, where there was interest in doing “That’s My Bush!” as a pilot (they would have made accommodations to set the show in a Gore White House).

Instead, they stayed at Comedy Central, agreeing to produce 30 more “South Park” episodes and also create new shows, the first of which is “That’s My Bush!” It was a trade-off based in part on the fact that with “South Park,” Parker and Stone have not had to deal with much interference from executives.

But before committing to the new series, Parker and Stone insisted Comedy Central not cut budgetary corners. For the comic premise to work, they felt “That’s My Bush!” needed to look like a network sitcom. According to Parker, the duo told Comedy Central: “You’ve got to pony up for [high-end] sets and [high-definition] cameras and, you know, it’s gotta be union everything.”

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In its 10-year history, the cable channel, a joint venture between the media conglomerates Viacom and AOL Time Warner, and now available in more than 70 million homes, has traditionally loaded its original programming schedule with cheap-to-produce stand-up comedy showcases, game shows and acquisitions of movies. Comedy Central has branched out in more recent years with original programming like the news spoof “The Daily Show,” the after-school special spoof “Strangers With Candy” and the regular-guy spoof “The Man Show,” but there’s still a junky look to much of its original programming that makes it undeniably basic cable. “That’s My Bush!”, then, at about $1 million an episode, is easily the most expensive show in the channel’s history.

To be sure, Comedy Central has hedged its bet, ordering only eight episodes. “If it works, we’ll make more. That’s the philosophy out of the gate,” says Debbie Liebling, senior vice president of original programming and development. “But the thing about Matt and Trey is, you kind of have to make that investment to go down the road with them because they’re going to try something that hasn’t been tried before.”

How long that road extends remains to be seen. “We want eight shows that can live for a long time,” says Parker, adding that “it’s gotta do pretty well” out of the gate for Comedy Central to justify the expense of more episodes.

As for the actual George W. Bush? There are evidently no plans for a cameo.

“The president is focused on implementing his agenda,” says Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman, asked if President Bush is aware of “That’s My Bush!”

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* “That’s My Bush!” premieres tonight at 10:30. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).