Cable-ready

Ray ROMANO is leaving, and Dave Chappelle is missing. This seems emblematic of where TV comedy is, circa 2005. On the broadcast networks, the sitcom is presumably dead or dying -- or, in the case of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” getting a farewell dinner Monday night, the show officially going off the air after nine seasons, Romano among the last of the buttoned-down stand-ups to graduate from a decade in the clubs to stardom in a classic, old-school show.

If the future of TV comedy is on cable, where the point is to throw out the old template and introduce fresh faces and fresh ideas, what cable series can’t seem to provide is the weekly companionship and stability that a show like “Everybody Loves Raymond” exuded.

Unless, perhaps, you do “Everybody Loves Raymond” with cursing, which is how the Hollywood Reporter this week described “American Dream,” a sitcom about middle-class parenting starring New York comedian Louis C.K. The show, picked up for 12 episodes by HBO, is the network’s mischievous answer to the question, “Is the sitcom over?”

Not if you can take the old box (multiple cameras, live studio audience, family situation) and fill it with mature subjects, not to mention swearing and nudity. Louis C.K., who formerly wrote for David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock, might just be smart enough to do this right, not just for kicks. Louis C.K. had a similar-sounding concept that CBS passed on last year, and there’s something kind of intriguingly passive-aggressive about HBO taking what feels tired and reintroducing it in adult form, in a show that looks like a sitcom but doesn’t talk like one. Meanwhile, over in the creatively compromised world, the broadcast networks stumble about in the dark, ordering comedies because they’re proven business models while living in denial about how stale the genre looks and sounds.

Chappelle once tried to fit into a sitcom -- a couple of them, in fact -- before he decamped to cable and became a sensation with “Chappelle’s Show” on Comedy Central. The sketch series, a cool evocation of Chappelle’s club act, with musical guests, became a hit for the network after two seasons, whereupon Comedy Central, not exactly known for such largess, signed Chappelle to a two-year deal reportedly worth $35 million to $50 million. Ten new episodes of “Chappelle’s Show” were supposed to debut May 31, but now Chappelle, who stars in and co-writes the show with Neal Brennan, has gone AWOL, with Entertainment Weekly reporting that he had checked into a South African mental health facility, for reasons that no one is clarifying.

Chappelle’s representatives have denied that the cause of the show’s delay was drug-related, which seems like a tacit attempt to disassociate Chappelle from a show business cliche while inviting speculation about why a hot 31-year-old comedian would vanish when he’s on the cusp of mega-success. Whatever the explanation for his disappearance turns out to be, Chappelle has always seemed to be knowing about the system.

“If you believe that you deserve all that money and adulation, that’s a problem,” record producer legend Quincy Jones wrote about Michael Jackson and the vagaries of fame on Arianna Huffington’s new blog the other day. “If you believe you don’t deserve it, that’s also a problem. And if you don’t understand this, you’re in trouble.”

On cable, artists are freer to take creative chances but also freer to be who they are. The volatility and surprise that Chappelle brought has been airbrushed out of the network sitcom game, where shows -- and their stars -- don’t get on the air until executives are reasonably satisfied that the show -- and the star -- will be safe and well behaved enough for audiences and the Federal Communications Commission to feel comfortable with, which in turn reassures the bosses that the shows will be manageable to produce over the long haul.

The rub, of course, is that in working so hard to guarantee a long haul, the shows never get there. There have been exceptions over the years (Roseanne comes to mind, and Ellen DeGeneres, who decided, controversially, to come out as a lesbian midway through the run of her ABC series, alienating her network bosses). But the model nowadays is more like David Spade, ex of “Saturday Night Live” and the NBC sitcom “Just Shoot Me,” who can be counted on to show up and be a Cliffs Notes version of David Spade wherever you put him.

Spade is currently waiting to see if ABC’s “8 Simple Rules” will be picked up for another season. Regardless, what Spade exudes is that it’s all just a job, and he is fine with this. Chappelle never was, taking development deals in the late 1990s, a chapter in his career that ended with the comedian charging that Fox wanted him to add more white characters to a planned sitcom.

You’re supposed to go more quietly than this. On cable, Chappelle got what he wanted: abundant creative control and relatively low ratings expectations. And so he took chances. You could feel it in the characters he developed for filmed sketches -- the blind black white supremacist Clayton Bigsby and a send-up of the cocaine-addled funk legend Rick James -- and in the way his show was executed, as a kind of raunchy salon with Chappelle as host, dressed in floppy hats and baggy street clothes, his sweet, hangdog expression not much different from the expression he has long worn in comedy clubs.

Left alone on TV, as he is in a club, Chappelle could play around and be himself. Now that need to be left alone and be himself has manifested itself as a darker story. For Comedy Central, the instability of “Chappelle’s Show” is in inverse proportion to “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” which has become so established that last week Comedy Central announced a spinoff starring “Daily Show” senior correspondent Stephen Colbert in something called “The Colbert Report.”

“As ‘The Daily Show’ is to sort of a headline-driven news, this will be to [Bill] O’Reilly or [Sean] Hannity or ‘Scarborough Country,’ ” Colbert said recently, interviewed on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

He said the idea for the series had been sparked in part by the scandal that enveloped Fox News’ O’Reilly last year, when a producer alleged that he’d sexually harassed her.

“What that said to us is that there was more to be done with the character-driven news than had been done already,” Colbert said. “I mean, Bill O’Reilly’s purported, alleged, unproven, settled sex scandal hinted at a personal life that you never got to hear about, that you never got to see. And we hope to show some of that. So it’s not just going to be satire, it’s also going to be a little bit about the life of Colbert beyond the show.”

By the sound of things, the show has echoes of the talk show character Alan Partridge, created by Steve Coogan on the BBC, or maybe even Larry Sanders of HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” Who knows.

But Colbert is brilliant, and he seems like someone going into this new venture with his eyes open. He’s on cable, where shows evolve more organically, or haphazardly, or somewhere in between.