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Fox Brings Back To You 2 Comedy Stars Who've Been Away From Sitcoms Awhile

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By WALT BELCHER | The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 18, 2007

Making fun of local television news is almost too easy. Since the days of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and on through "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," we've laughed at vapid anchors and reporters, egos run amok, flubbed lines and other embarrassing on-air moments.

We can laugh again at 8 Wednesday when Fox debuts "Back to You," a sitcom set in a Pittsburgh newsroom with some familiar faces.

Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton and Fred Willard are well out of Fox's youthful audience demographic. But they are pros at the comedy game, and they help make "Back to You" a slick, polished, funny sitcom with some well-timed punch lines.

Grammer plays Chuck Darling, a pompous windbag who has returned to WURG-TV in Pittsburgh after his anchoring career went bust in Los Angeles. He was caught on camera, in an unguarded moment, blurting out a string of obscenities. After it was posted on the Internet, he became an infamous joke.

At WURG, Darling will work with his former co-anchor Kelly Carr (Heaton). She never left Pittsburgh, and she has more than one reason to resent Darling.

Willard, always brilliant as a clueless goof, plays the longtime sexist sports anchor Marsh McGinley.

When Chuck remarks that Kelly "would wade through a pool of piranhas to get on camera," Marsh, without missing a beat, says, "Remember when she did that? It was a helluva sweeps week."

Also in the WURG newsroom is a sexy meteorologist, Montana Stevens (Ayda Field); an eager baby-faced news director (Josh Gad); and a frustrated reporter, Gary Crezyzewski (Ty Burrell), who longs to be an anchor. The guy with the tongue-twisting name realizes how dumb it looks to be standing in the rain outside an empty courthouse "where something happened yesterday."

There are traces of Frasier Crane in Grammer's Chuck Darling. But that's not a bad thing. Frasier was one of the popular characters in television history. Grammer played him for 20 years on "Cheers" and "Frasier."

Playing a TV anchor is a snap, Grammer says, because "most television newscasting now has nothing do with the news anyway."

"So I'm very happy to just be another performer pretending to be a performer," he said in an interview in July during the annual fall preview tour for TV critics.

He says a TV newsroom is "a perfect backdrop for satire and farce."

"It's not unlike the situation we had on 'Fraiser,' but it feels more like 'Cheers,'" he says.

Heaton says she researched her role by watching a lot of clips of newscasts from various cities throughout the country.

"It was amazing to watch how the hairdos changed in the different markets," Heaton says. "You've got your local New York anchors — the gals who really could use a little wax on the brow. And it keeps changing all the way to the West Coast, where some of them look like hookers."

Grammer notes that Frasier and Chuck are both self-obsessed, but they exist in very different worlds.

"For all his flaws, Frasier really was out to do the world some good," he says." Chuck is out to do himself some good. He's in the TV news business, after all."

Heaton's character is strong, sometimes abrasive and usually aggravated by the men in her life. That's not far from the role she played as the long-suffering wife on "Everybody Loves Raymond."

"After nine years of doing a show like 'Raymond,' it was hard to find something that compares," Heaton says. She describes her new character this way: "She has a really big heart, but she's pretty uptight. She has as big an ego as Chuck, but she tries to temper it."

Heaton and Grammer say they are coming to television because they want to work, and this was the best offer available. Both have the same agent, and Heaton says they have wanted to work together since their respective series ended.

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