Good News About the New Season

Quite in the same conceptual small-town universe is NBC‘s Ed, a romantic comedy in which Tom Cavanagh as the title character, having lost his big-city job and cheating wife in a single day, gets back to where he once belonged -- fictional Stuckeyville, Ohio -- to make a new old life for himself and court the girl he was too shy to talk to in high school (Julie Bowen, from TV’s short-lived Three -- and fluent in Italian, you might like to know), even though she‘s going out with Gregory Harrison. He courts her heedlessly and elaborately and pathologically -- in a suit of armor, for instance. He also buys a bowling alley. Created by Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman, both vets of The Late Show With David Letterman (Letterman’s Worldwide Pants co-produces the series), it‘s well-written, quirky and sweet -- old-fashioned sweet, even at times a little too sweet, but ultimately redeemed by the authors’ Late Show absurdity training. Cavanagh, who reminds me continually of The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, if Jon Stewart were stretched on a rack, has an engaging and original manner (except for the Jon Stewart resemblance), and is persuasively quixotic in a Capraesque mode -- he‘s Mr. Deeds come back from town. But Stuckeyville itself is more out of Sturges, the screwball American hamlet of Hail the Conquering Hero or The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, rigidly ordered and on the verge of pandemonium (with Michael Ian Black -- Johnny Blue Jeans of Viva Variety! ”fame“ -- as Ed‘s slacker-entrepreneur aide down at the lanes, occupying the approximate William Demarest position). I think it no coincidence that Eddie Bracken, the star of those two films, showed up here as magician Stuckeyville Stan -- happy casting indeed. Bracken was old-pro wonderful, and if the season continues this well I’ll have to give up the criticizing for proselytizing: TV is great! Watch TV! (Ah, but you know it won‘t.) (Will it?)