Fall TV Preview
Entertainment Weekly
September 22, 2000
The season's most intriguingly low key show is 'Ed' -- this despite the fact that its premise is, when stated baldly, quite appalling: Ed Stevens, a big city lawyer played by Tom Cavanagh, is first fired by his firm and then cuckolded by his wife (with their mailman, for Pete's sake -- Ed catches them in flagrante postino, as it were). Ed heads back to his tiny hometown, called Stuckeyville, and realizes he's still in love with a girl he had a crush on in high school, Carol Vessey (the luminous, wry Julie Bowen), and sets about winning her over.
Oh, yeah -- he also buys the town bowling alley (to attract customers, he gives out free legal advice if you bowl three games). And Ed's idea of courtship includes donning a suit of armor before asking Carol out on a first date.
"The last show that was like this was 'Northern Exposure' -- not always hilarious, but interesting and different," says executive producer Rob Burnett, semifamous as the gnomic, gnomish producer David Letterman used to pick on almost nightly before he started picking almost nightly on Maria Pope.
'Ed,' though an NBC show, is produced by David Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants, and Burnett says the old man himself "took the [pilot] script home, wrote some lines, added some jokes." What should we watch for? "He added something that Shirley, the diffident woman working in the bowling alley, says -- the bit about 'I have a kitty named Kenny.'" ("Kenny," longtime Letterman watchers know, is a name that strikes the talk show host as inherently funny.) "Dave tinkered a lot with that," says Burnett.
Parts of the 'Ed' pilot are being reshot to accommodate the late in the game casting of Gregory Harrison as the boyfriend from whom Ed must woo Carol away. Burnett promises, "Even with the reshoots, this will remain the funniest bowling alley slash lawyer slash romantic comedy on the air -- I guarantee it."
Cavanagh expresses a little dismay at having his character competing with a dashing devil like Harrison, but says with a carefully pondered logic worthy of Ed himself, "As good looking as [Harrison] is, I keep telling myself, the show's called 'Ed,' so I'm bound to get the girl, right?"