Try branching out, viewers

I was watching “Samantha Who?” the other night, because I like to, and reflecting on how Hollywood’s current labor problems -- or management problems, if you prefer -- might abbreviate, or at any rate interrupt, its life. And I felt a little bit sad, suddenly, not just for the “Samantha” people, but for all the people of a newborn TV season whose shows might be cut down in their prime time. (Well, for many of them -- I did not feel that sad for the big shots behind “Big Shots.”)

It is already hard enough to get a series going in this distracted world, between an audience that has many other (if not necessarily better) things to look at, and networks still addicted to big results in short order. There is something actually quite delicate about an American network television series; it continues to gestate after birth. (British series, by contrast, and the domestic cable series that ape them, emerge more fully formed -- they get right up and walk, like calves and foals.) Though the highly competitive, fear-saturated, Nielsen-monitored nature of big-time TV show business initially prompts safe choices around even the stranger series, most get less conservative as they go along; they find their legs over time. But time is increasingly what they are not allowed.

Ironically, while the strike looks sure to shorten the season of most every scripted series, it also means that the networks are more likely to air everything they have in the can, and to shoot everything they have a script for. For the moment, and until the stuff runs out, Death takes a holiday.

This bodes especially well for ABC’s “Men in Trees,” another show I watch because I like to, and would like you to, too, so I can continue to watch it. It has, in spite of less-than-stellar ratings, lasted into a second season -- although technically we are still coming to the end of the first: Unceremoniously pulled from the rotation last March to make room for the lesser “October Road,” the show banked the last five episodes of its first season and moved them into the second. (A little confusingly: Events in the series that take place in spring are taking place in the real-world fall.)

We are only just now coming to the climax of that first-season arc, as the little town of Elmo, Alaska, prepares for a wedding, and Marin (Anne Heche) and Jack (James Tupper) noncommittally circle each other yet again. (The intended two-part first-season finale begins tonight at 8 and concludes next week.) With 10 new episodes already shot, and four completed scripts to shoot, “Men in Trees” has the potential to be the longest-lived series of the 2007-08 TV year.

To recap for those who may have been otherwise occupied, Heche plays Marin Frist, a New York self-help author and “relationship coach” who is ditched by her fiance just before making an unlikely personal appearance in far-flung Elmo, to promote her latest book. She decides to stay; Elmo is full of men, and she thinks she might learn something about them, to help her in her work, and possibly her life. This is time-honored stuff; we could sit here all day, you and I, trading the names of such change-of-scene stories, from “The Quiet Man” to “Green Acres” to “Private Practice,” to name just the first few that popped into my head.

Created by “Sex and the City” veteran Jenny Bicks, its premise might be oversimplified as “Let’s drop Carrie Bradshaw into the frosty middle of nowhere.” But the unavoidable (and ultimately unfair) comparison is to the much-loved “Northern Exposure,” another series in which a New Yorker takes up residence in a sub-Arctic town full of quirky characters. (It could be argued, of course, that nearly every made-up town on television is full of quirky characters.) Indeed it can seem that “Men in Trees” dares you not to make the comparison -- there is even, as in “Northern Exposure,” a white radio host with a black half-brother. Both series make good, dramatic use of the local scenery and weather. (British Columbia stands in here for Alaska). And each turns somewhat around a sputtering, opposite-attractive relationship between a city mouse (Marin, in “Trees”) and a country mouse (the taciturn biologist Jack, played by Tupper).

And both are ultimately about community. “How can something so small have such deep roots?” Marin wonders, at once thinking of a little tree in her yard, and the little town in which she lives. Given the limitations on cast size, it is of course a little incestuous. Bar owner Ben (Abraham Benrubi) has had relationships with both former town prostitute Sara (Suleka Mathew) and formerly estranged wife Theresa (Sarah Strange). But that is television’s great subject -- most series are ultimately about community, of the workplace, the family, the town. We don’t choose our shows for their stars so much as for their ensembles; we become vicariously enmeshed in their chemistry.

As far as that goes, I would never have guessed that a series starring Heche would last even this long -- although a phenomenally good actress, her appeal, even her sex appeal, is oddly cerebral for mainstream television. It’s what makes her a more than usually interesting heroine and a less than usually warm one. In a way, it sets the tone for the whole show, which, though thoroughly a romance, invested in the glory of love, is wary of it at the same time; it has a mature mix of doubt and hope. It’s a grown-up entertainment. Apart from the affianced Patrick (Derek Richardson) and Annie (Emily Bergl), who are broad comic relief, the players for the most part are refreshingly not young. I’m not sure how old Marin is supposed to be, but Heche is 38; much of the rest of the cast is in their late 30s and early 40s. John Amos, as bush pilot Buzz, is 67. Parenthood (never much of a concern on “Northern Exposure”) is a repeating theme.

Following Heche’s lead, the female characters are livelier than the male, who are variously dreamy, sweet, inarticulate and slightly strange. (Does this make it a “woman’s show”?) I love Cynthia Stevenson, as Police Chief Celia -- she can play comedy and tragedy in the same beat -- and the now-departed Justine Bateman as Jack’s pregnant ex-girlfriend. Bateman’s acting has the rightness of breath, and I hope the series will stick around long enough to use her again.

Somehow, the show has stayed afloat, in spite of schedule changes and that short first season. Frankly, I don’t know what makes a show live or die. (I point no fingers; perhaps “Men in Trees” has been kept alive until now strictly on the whim of some loving ABC exec.) On Friday nights this season, the show has been running third, at 10 p.m., against “Numb3rs” and “Las Vegas,” prompting a shift to 8 p.m. (As an armchair programmer, I can’t for the life of me figure out why it isn’t paired with the eminently compatible “Private Practice.”) That is not the best time slot ever, but there it is. Still here for now. Have a look.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Men in Trees’

Where: ABC

When: 8 to 9 p.m. Fridays

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable

for young children)