Can ‘The Winner’ live up to its title?

RICKY BLITT has ideas about TV comedy that he knows might lead some creative types in Hollywood to label him, as he puts it, “borderline retarded.”

But when you’re a 40-ish, 5-foot-2 guy with a white afro and a Canadian accent who lives in West Hollywood and doesn’t know how to drive, people may give you funny looks for reasons that have nothing to do with creating a sitcom about a 32-year-old loser who hangs out with a 14-year-old kid.

Blitt is the eccentric force behind “The Winner,” starring the popular former “Daily Show” correspondent Rob Corddry as an unemployed, neurotic mess of a man who strives to change when a former high-school flame reenters his life (yes, Blitt says the idea is partly autobiographical). Against all odds, we’re told in the opening credits that Glen Abbott eventually becomes “the richest man in Buffalo.”

For Fox, which has been heavily promoting the six-episode run that begins March 4, the series marks another attempt, amid a frustrating catalog of disappointments such as this season’s “Happy Hour” and “ ‘Til Death,” to find a new flagship live-action comedy series.

For Blitt, “The Winner” represents something else -- a chance to prove that Hollywood’s current conventional wisdom about TV comedy is all wrong. Blitt, a veteran writer on Fox’s “Family Guy,” thinks the sitcom genre is in trouble because network executives have embraced what’s trendy and chucked the creative traditions that made audiences fall in love with shows like “Seinfeld” and “Cheers.”

“The Winner” was shot in front of a live audience with a “multiple-camera” setup that nearly all TV viewers would instantly recognize as the same look that has governed hit comedies from “I Love Lucy” to “Two and a Half Men.” But Blitt says he had to fight for the privilege, because multi-camera work has fallen out of favor in many network suites with the success of “single-camera” comedies such as HBO’s “Sex and the City” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Those series don’t use live audiences or laugh tracks, are designed to look and feel more like movies and are seen by many executives as having the kind of sophisticated feel that young, well-educated viewers supposedly require these days.

Blitt hates that thinking.

“I’ve always had reverence for multi-cam,” Blitt said during a long lunchtime interview at Jerry’s Famous Deli in West Hollywood, where he arrived by cab (after one meeting a few years back, Blitt said, Henry Winkler got lost giving him a ride back to his house). “If ‘Seinfeld’ was single cam, it would have been dead in the water. It depended on nuance and people talking to each other. It didn’t depend on a jittery hand-held camera.

“I always thought ‘The Office’ could be a much better show if it was multi-cam,” he added. “But there’s no party you can go into in L.A. where you won’t sound borderline retarded for having said that.”

I demurred, pointing out that “The Office” makes extensive use of close-ups that wouldn’t be possible in a traditional sitcom set-up, and Blitt moderated his criticism a bit. But he’s correct when he says that the network infatuation with single-camera technique has coincided with a lot of flop shows and a lot of Hollywood hand-wringing about the puzzling decline of the sitcom. Meanwhile, the most-watched comedy on TV is a good old multi-camera show.

“ ‘Two and a Half Men’ is a breakout hit,” Blitt said. “None of these single-camera shows are. Most of them die a quick death; the other ones are relative hits.”

Of course, “The Winner” may not live up to its title, either. Fox executives realize they’re pedaling uphill with a comedy about a grown man who has the emotional and sexual maturity of a junior-high kid. That’s hardly what marketers would call an “aspirational” theme.

“This is a unique concept, one that is a little bit alternative,” Fox Entertainment President Peter Liguori said by phone. He quickly added: “But not as alternative as some may interpret.” In an extra measure of caution, Fox is scheduling “The Winner” at 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. Sundays, just before and after “Family Guy,” which shares a similarly off-kilter sense of humor.

Even so, Fox was particularly nervous, Blitt said, about the relationship between Glen and his 14-year-old pal, Josh (Keir Gilchrist). A pedophilia joke in the pilot episode set executives’ teeth on edge, but Blitt felt it was necessary to defuse audience tension about the unusual relationship.

“They begged me to take it out,” Blitt said. “I said, ‘Somebody has to say it.’ ”

But he doesn’t want people getting the wrong idea. The relationship with the kid “isn’t autobiographical even 1%,” he said.

Fighting over a pedophilia gag isn’t something many TV producers can boast of, but then Blitt is about as far from a slick, vain Hollywood insider as it’s possible to get. He’s soft-bodied and gnomish, with a tic that makes him jerk his head to the right every few seconds, as if someone were invisibly squeezing his shoulder.

As he joked to a group of reporters at a press conference promoting “The Winner” this month, his physical appearance offers “a visual feast.”

But he’s acquired his views through years of hard experience in the TV writer-producer factory. “The Winner” was first made in 2002, as a single-camera pilot called “Becoming Glen,” with Johnny Galecki in the title role. The show wasn’t picked up, and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, Blitt’s longtime friend and mentor, thinks he knows why.

“The single-camera version was kind of a disappointment,” MacFarlane said. “It was nowhere near as funny as what was on the page.”

Like Blitt, MacFarlane is a fan of multi-camera sitcoms. “Even after 50 or 60 years, it resonates with a communal feel,” he said. “The format just works. There’s a warmth you don’t have with a single camera.”

Blitt just hopes some of that warmth will rub off on his admittedly quirky concept. He feels a real affinity for his sitcom alter ego, who’s still a virgin at 32.

“There’s an awful lot of people not serviced on TV,” he said. “Not everybody is married with three kids.”

Scott Collins’ Channel Island television column runs every Monday in Calendar. Contact him at channelisland

@latimes.com