Married ... With Issues

At 2:30 p.m. on a recent Friday, Brad Hall took lunch at his desk on the Culver Studios lot. His office is spacious but barren, the big desk and big couch looking like the last two pieces of furniture to be hauled out on moving day. Hall opened a takeout container and began picking at a chicken sandwich and fries. There was a reporter on his couch, and as he ate, Hall persevered with amiable self-deprecation through a series of questions, all of which seemed a little dishonest, given their underlying theme: Would you be here if you weren’t married to Julia Louis-Dreyfus?

On Feb. 26 at 8:30 p.m., Louis-Dreyfus will become the third former “Seinfeld” co-star to begin a new series, playing a nightclub jazz singer in the midseason NBC comedy “Watching Ellie.” Ellie is Eleanor Riggs, a plucky vocalist of some talent who must nevertheless get by singing at weddings and such. After nine seasons on “Seinfeld,” shining in her own way but also under the creative auspices of men, Louis-Dreyfus gets to show off her considerable sex appeal, and yes, sing. Ellie is single and lives in a Los Angeles apartment (think Los Feliz-area one bedroom, $1,400 a month, walking distance to trendy stuff on Vermont), and she is pursued by a collection of damaged men whom the “Sex and the City” gals would reduce to punch lines in less than one breakfast.

Most prominently, “Watching Ellie” will test whether Louis-Dreyfus can overcome the perceived “Seinfeld” albatross, after the resounding failures of “The Michael Richards Show” and “Bob Patterson,” starring Jason Alexander. But “Watching Ellie” is also a test of Hall, who created the show, and whose career has come to epitomize the excessive, multimillion-dollar studio deals handed out to sitcom writers in the 1990s, when huge hits abounded and one needed only to have spent time in the writers’ room of “Friends,” “Seinfeld” or “Cheers” to cash in.

Today, the environment is less generous, most of those so-called “overall deals” having failed to produce new hits. In the current sitcom recession, dramas grab the headlines and unscripted programming keeps proving it’s more than a passing curiosity. But success can still be had by being in the right place at the right time. By being married, for instance, to Louis-Dreyfus at the moment she decides to return to prime time.

This isn’t the first time that Hall, who has virtually no sitcom staff experience, has managed to skip over the years-long steps by which a TV writer becomes a show runner--that is, the executive producer who oversees all aspects of a project. What is still unknown is whether Hall truly deserves the abuse of his peers, or whether the combination of disdain and envy he inspires is more global, of a sort that could be directed at any writer whose development deal bought a big house but didn’t create a good show.

Hall, 43, joined this fraternity (and it is mostly men) in 1996, when he signed a development deal with Big Ticket Television to create sitcoms for a reported $15 million. The deal, which tied Hall exclusively to CBS, made him one of the highest-paid writers in television, even though his only show-running experience had come as executive producer of NBC’s “The Single Guy,” the failed mid-’90s sitcom starring Jonathan Silverman as a single guy (hence the title) surrounded by a gaggle of married friends.

NBC liked the pilot, but came to dislike the show and Hall’s handling of it. He was dismissed or left, depending on whom you talk to, and went directly into the embrace of his Big Ticket millions. In a Daily Variety article announcing the deal, Hall’s handlers noted that CBS had “identified Brad very early on as [being] at the forefront of a new generation of show creators,” and the credits that suggested Hall’s chops were duly noted: former writer-performer on “Saturday Night Live”; mentored by respected writer-producer Gary David Goldberg on the acclaimed series “Brooklyn Bridge.” Plus, he came from theater.

Hall’s exclusive arrangement with CBS included heavy episodic commitments to whatever ideas he dreamed up. “He will bring a slightly younger demographic to the network, a different sensibility for us,” CBS Television President Leslie Moonves said at the time.

Hall made at least one pilot he liked for Big Ticket and CBS, but it didn’t make it to air, and with more than a year left on his contract, he walked away from the game altogether, evidently beaten down by politics. He left millions on the table. “He was honorable,” says Larry Lyttle, Big Ticket Television chief. “Most people wouldn’t have done what Brad Hall did. People should say, ‘There’s a really solid guy.’”

Hall withdrew, temporarily, in that wonderful way that Hollywood’s writer establishment can withdraw. He saw movies and read books. He adapted two novels into unproduced screenplays and took some script doctor assignments from the studios. He spent time with his kids and practiced classical guitar.

“You start out as an artist in some way or other,” he says, picking at his fries. “And my background is all theater, and I goofed into doing TV comedy. And so I thought, ‘Well, what’s going to make me really, really happy, and therefore a good husband and good father and good citizen?’”

This was, more or less, what Hall was thinking when he wrote the pilot for “Watching Ellie.”

Hall is 6-foot-2, fair-haired and thin; he looks like one of those Harvard Lampoon guys, but in fact he attended Northwestern. At any rate, he seems, in person, the wrong guy to hate. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he grew up in the rectory of All Saints by the Sea in Montecito, the youngest of six children of an Episcopalian priest father. People, Hall says, would just appear in his living room. What he describes sounds like a show.

He came up with Ellie Riggs without telling his wife, he says.

Louis-Dreyfus spends much of the pilot episode partially clothed, getting ready for a club gig. Her sister calls. The toilet overflows. The men in Ellie’s life are brought onstage and introduced. There’s her infatuated neighbor (played by Peter Stormare, memorable as Steve Buscemi’s homicidal sidekick in “Fargo”) and her obsequious ex. There’s Ellie’s current beau, a married sideman in her jazz band. The action unfolds in “real time,” with a clock, barely visible at times, counting down in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. No matter what Ellie is doing, in other words, viewers will see the action occur in 22 consecutive minutes--like the Chinese restaurant episode of “Seinfeld,” only that sort of thing every week.

Comedy pilots, by their nature, come at the viewer screaming a broad premise and high-octane laughs. Hall is of the opinion that this particular sitcom convention has “become fraudulent.”

“Often, not always,” he says. “But often, in that there’s all this explanation. So we just decided, let’s just do away with that.

“I’m not even concerned [if the pilot] is hilarious. It should just be amusing and fun. It should be entertaining to get to know her, more in a way like you get to know people.”

So far, “Watching Ellie” is being sold for what it isn’t. It isn’t a sitcom with a laugh track. It isn’t a show with immediately discernible relationships. It doesn’t have three jokes on every page. But alongside the buzzwords being bandied about--”risk-taking,” “different”--is a sense that Hall, in absolving himself of the pressure of being funny on every page, had better produce something original for the privilege.

“I think Brad really wishes he were Larry David,” says a writer familiar with Hall. David, the revered “Seinfeld” co-creator, has gone on to fashion the idiosyncratic “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” an HBO comedy currently reinventing the wheel in that it features a fussy, rich TV writer as its protagonist in improvised, layered scenes of confrontation.

HBO, a pay cable network largely free of ratings pressure, programs a select few original series each year, promotes them to the hilt and then waits for the good press to roll in. Hall and Louis-Dreyfus wanted to do “Watching Ellie” there.

Last February, when the couple pitched the show to HBO and the four major broadcast networks, they tried to make it clear that, if they couldn’t do a show at HBO, they still wanted to play by HBO’s rulebook. That meant airing the series free of commercials, restricting network notes to one spokesman, and limiting the number of episodes per year to 15 instead of the customary 22. “I always loved the idea that all they did was 16 ‘Fawlty Towers,’” Hall says, referring to the classic British TV comedy starring John Cleese as the proprietor of a hotel.

The couple thought they were taking the right approach: delivering a star but also a script to go with her, a script the star liked, with none of the hassles and money it typically takes to get a show out of development. But the stipulations were quickly perceived as haughty.

“The amount of attention on the deal was hilarious to me ... especially considering the fact that everything we did was a sacrifice and yet was seen as arrogant,” Hall says. “Why, because we want to make less money? [Because] we want to bring you the show without a huge commitment?”

HBO passed, as did Fox, CBS and ABC. NBC, according to sources, was the only serious bidder all along. For Jeff Zucker, at that point the network’s newly installed entertainment chief, “Watching Ellie” fit neatly into a series of moves that would signal a new sheriff had arrived at the home of quality scripted comedies and dramas. This includes scheduling ever-more outrageous reality series (the ratings hit “Fear Factor,” where contestants were recently seen eating pig rectum) and taking a chance on another “Seinfeld” co-star, in an expensive project written by her writer-husband.

“I think Jeff wants to be the cat that ate the canary on this one,” says a show source, acknowledging that the scuttlebutt around town is generally cynical about “Watching Ellie’s” prospects for survival. It didn’t help when Carsey Werner Mandabach, the boutique independent studio tapped to oversee the production, got skittish about the financial arrangement and withdrew its money from the show.

It is with the confidence of a network head that Zucker calls Louis-Dreyfus “a very enticing star.” Of the series, which has tentatively been given a 12-episode order, Zucker says: “It does get funnier, but it’s never going to be ‘Friends’ or ‘Will & Grace.’” He means that it’s unfair to judge a single-camera show alongside a bawdy laugher. He also keeps mentioning Louis-Dreyfus’ name, as in: “I personally believe a lot in Julia, and I really like the different concept.”

Hall has been with Louis-Dreyfus for more than 20 years and married to her for 15; he loves her more than anyone. “She’s unbelievable and real,” he says. “On ‘Seinfeld,’ that was sort of her job, to be the one who was very, very real. And funny, but real. And the way she worked with props, the way she eats, the way she does certain things on screen, I think, is just amazing. And not easy. And easily overlooked. It’s a really special skill to be able to pick up a phone the way that a human picks up a phone. It’s not as easy as you think.”

They were drama students at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., when they met. Hall founded the Practical Theater Company and hired Louis-Dreyfus to be in one of his shows. She would later be cast in the famed improvisational comedy troupe next door, Second City.

Together, Hall and Louis-Dreyfus were plucked for the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” enduring two unremarkable seasons, 1982-84. They moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s; soon enough, Louis-Dreyfus hit the mother lode, cast as Elaine Benes, the ex-girlfriend-turned-pal of comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Hall acted in features. At a dinner party in 1991, he says, he met Gary David Goldberg. The two hit it off, and Hall went to work on two of Goldberg’s subsequent series, “American Dreamer,” a sitcom, and the nostalgic “Brooklyn Bridge,” which mixed comedy and drama.

All of this, of course, happened before he became that Brad Hall. “I was very, very happy in Chicago as an actor making $168 a week,” he says. “And when it became more important in the paper how much money I was making, I thought that was grotesque.”

On “Watching Ellie,” Hall has a writing staff of four. On this Friday, three of them are holed up in a room that has an empty bookcase and a smaller sofa than Hall’s (perhaps superstition prevents writers of new shows from actually moving in to their digs).

They are Andrew Gottlieb (formerly of “The Single Guy”), Joe Furey (formerly of “NewsRadio”) and Jeffrey Ross, best known for his work on Comedy Central as a kind of third-generation Friar’s Club comedian. They insist that media reports of the show’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated and bat around the misnomer of the “Seinfeld” curse. “I think people are angry that you’re not playing these characters anymore,” Furey says.

There is no writers’ room, per se, on “Watching Ellie.” At “The Single Guy,” where Hall did run a room, he earned a reputation as someone who didn’t trust his writers. It was a staff that included Jay Kogen (“Frasier,” “The Simpsons”) and Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, the creative team behind “Will & Grace.”

The image of Hall that emerges, from some of those who were around the show at the time, is of a harried show runner trying to please two masters, increasingly torn between fickle network demands and his own vision--not so much imperious as overwhelmed. “The writers were standing around doing nothing,” says someone familiar with how the show functioned.

Hall concedes that he did a lot of solo rewrites (“We were behind a lot,” he says, “so there was a lot of catching-up writing, late at night”). He adds, of the joke rooms that dominate network comedies: “I just don’t like it. So I never really did it that way.”

None of this behind-the-scenes tumult is unusual. The trick, of course, is to produce a hit show, at which point you’re deemed an eccentric genius (i.e., Aaron Sorkin, the dramatist-savant behind “The West Wing”).

“Part of the skill is not so much how great a pure writer you are, but also your ability to navigate the network waters,” says Marty Adelstein, Hall’s longtime agent, who is leaving the Endeavor Agency to become a talent manager. “He’s a pure creator and a pure writer.”

There isn’t much on the resume to back this up, but then Hall has experienced the flip side of this hyperbole. He has been told he’s great and handed millions, and then had to pay the price for having powerful handlers able to close big deals.

Hall will tell you “The Single Guy” wasn’t a bad show, and that it did a better job of holding its “Friends” lead-in audience than any of the please-be-like-”Friends” sitcoms NBC has scheduled Thursday nights at 8:30 since.

The show averaged nearly 25 million viewers its first season, which would have been terrific for anything that wasn’t sandwiched between “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”

He will also say that his development deal was a mistake. Artistically. “Maybe they work out sometimes. I don’t know, do they?

And then Hall says what you’ve perhaps been waiting for him to say all along: “You know what? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have an unbelievably beautiful, well-known wife. And the people who criticize me don’t.”

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“Watching Ellie” will air Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. beginning Feb. 26 on NBC.

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Paul Brownfield is a Times staff writer.