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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is messed up and real in the innovative "Watching Ellie," but the heroine in "Leap of Faith" is a formulaic Empowered TV Woman with fake problems.
Feb 28, 2002 | In the late 1940s, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were looking for a way to work together, as their marriage was buckling under the strain of their divergent careers. Then, in 1950, CBS offered Ball the chance to create a TV version of her popular radio show, "My Favorite Husband." She insisted that her real-life husband be involved, and in the process of trying to fit the project to both his wife's artistic needs and their personal circumstances, Arnaz invented the modern sitcom.
Lucy liked performing in front of an audience, but didn't want to leave her California home (all shows at the time were shot in New York), so Arnaz bought and retrofitted a Hollywood soundstage to accommodate an audience, changing city zoning laws while he was at it. With an audience watching, the show needed to be filmed in sequence, like a play. This would have been impossible using traditional single-camera methods, so Arnaz enlisted game-show producer Al Simon and cinematographer Karl Freund to devise a multiple camera process and a lighting scheme that would permit shooting master shots, medium shots and close-ups all at once.
Fifty years later, in a nifty twist, another popular and gifted comedic actress has joined forces with her husband to put on a TV show. After a long hiatus, "Seinfeld" star Julia Louis-Dreyfus has returned to prime time with "Watching Ellie," a comedy about a quasi-single, semi-successful Los Angeles nightclub singer that premiered Tuesday on NBC. "Watching Ellie" is one of two new shows, the other being "Leap of Faith" -- premiering Wednesday night, also on NBC -- that try to wrestle with the sitcom form while at the same time addressing that perennial favorite topic of TV, the trials and tribulations of unmarried womanhood. But while "Watching Ellie" provides a fresh, funny and strikingly realistic change of pace, "Leap of Faith" is too derivative to be entirely successful.
Like "I Love Lucy," "Watching Ellie" is a lovingly constructed showcase that plays to the strengths of TV's funniest, best-loved and most fictionally troubled female nut job. And, like "Lucy," "Watching Ellie's" innovations also seem to have resulted from creative solutions to its star's particular needs and circumstances that might, at least for a while, change the way network comedies are made.
Louis-Dreyfus gives full credit for the show's idea and format -- no studio audience, no laugh track and one camera instead of the usual three -- to her husband, Brad Hall. The show takes place in real time, presenting a 22-minute slice of Ellie's life with a single commercial interruption. (The commercials are ushered in by an in-your-face freeze frame rather than the usual distracted dissolve.) Hall also traded in the traditional "writer's room" (in which a small herd of writers toil to fill a daunting jokes-per-minute quota) for a smaller team of writers who write each episode independently, and swapped the rimshot cadences of the traditional sitcom for a series of awkward moments and excruciating scenarios.
"I was interested in the in-between moments," Louis-Dreyfus explains in a conference-call interview, "moments when you are standing there, breathing in an elevator or looking in the mirror or crying for no reason -- the 'connective tissue stuff,' as Brad says." Hall also created a character loosely based on his wife ("Ellie is me with the volume turned up, making really bad choices," she says) and cast her real-life sister, Lauren Bowles, as her sister on the show. Louis-Dreyfus also convinced the studio to let them produce only 13 episodes the first year (and 15 if the show is picked up for subsequent seasons), instead of the usual 22, in order, she says, "to protect my mental health, my family life, my emotional well-being."
In fact, in making "Watching Ellie," the couple claims to have made "no creative concessions," an achievement in itself. And if Hall can't be credited with actually inventing this format -- most of that credit goes to the creators of hit cable series such as "Sex and the City," which proved that audiences could embrace TV comedy in a nontraditional format -- getting away with it is impressive enough. "We wanted to push the edge of the envelope as far as half-hour TV goes," Louis-Dreyfus says. Considering that "Watching Ellie" is not exactly Beckett, it's impressive (if you look at how rigid the once-groundbreaking formula has become) how far they've actually gone.
Created by former "Sex and the City" producer Jenny Bicks, "Leap of Faith" also takes a single-camera look at the life of a single girl/woman/whatever in the big city, and has also forgone the laugh track, the group writing and the easily amused studio audience. Faith (Sarah Paulson), the eponymous heroine, is a New York advertising copywriter in her mid-30s who dumps her irritating fianci as her wedding date approaches. "Watching Ellie" and "Leap of Faith" have been relentlessly compared to their precursors, and if you listened in on the conference calls with Louis-Dreyfus and Bicks, as I did, you could see how this might get annoying after a while.
"I wrote a number of 'Sex and the City' episodes," says Bicks, "and I think what people are hearing is my voice. I cannot change my voice and shouldn't." (Though some might argue that she should consider changing the voices of her characters so they don't sound exactly like those on "Sex and the City.") But that, pretty much, is where the similarities between "Leap of Faith" and "Watching Ellie" end.
While Louis-Dreyfus' Ellie, a manic ball of neuroses whose moods swing as wildly as a desktop pendulum toy, comes across as refreshingly real, Paulson's Faith remains somewhat of a blank. Maybe it's because, like so many "Suddenly ... in the City" heroines before her, Faith is a nice girl whose creators seem to be taking pains to portray her as, you know, "empowered," meaning that her problems are external and usually man-shaped.
