Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 14, 1993 TAG: 9308140268
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL E. HILL THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Not so, protested a slightly flustered network executive. The show is on the schedule for a summer run, beginning Friday night (at 9:30).
On the face of it, "The Building" is a regular sitcom. It's created and largely written by Hunt, who plays a struggling actress returning to Chicago after her wedding has been canceled.
While setting out to re-establish her career, she moves into her old apartment across the street from Wrigley Field, her windows being occasional victims of Chicago Cubs' home runs.
She is surrounded by a best friend, Holly, played by Holly Wortell; an unemployed journalist, Don Lake; a fellow given to vulgar language, Richard Kohlman; a fireman-bartender, Mike Hagerty; and an actor, Tom Virtue.
Standard ensemble comedy show, right?
No. It's different. And this week CBS will begin to find out whether this brand of difference commands an audience.
So what's the difference?
Well, take Big Tony, the foul-mouthed character played by Kohlman. When he speaks, lots of his dialogue comes out in bleeps. (That's the way it was in the preview tape, anyway.)
And when Bonnie Hunt talks to her best friend, they both speak at the same time.
And the dialogue, even when not bleeped out or overlapped, is not the standard setup-punchline patter of the sitcom dialect.
The show is not a standard Hollywood product. In a star-driven medium, Hunt and the entire cast are relative unknowns. They're all from Chicago's Second City improvisational troupe.
No doubt they were helped through the CBS door by the fact that Hunt had had successful appearances on David Letterman's program, the one that's moving to CBS in two weeks. Letterman and Hunt are executive producers of "The Building."
Asked about the show, Letterman said simply that he thought it was different and good and should be husbanded.
But as Hunt tells it, CBS was as interested in changing the show as they were in husbanding it. Take that overlapping dialogue, for instance. "They said people would be confused," she said. "To be truly funny, you have to be as believable as possible. Women talk at the same time. When I'm with my mother, neither of us listens to the other."
At a time when many new network sitcoms center around families with children, she was asked, she said, to rewrite the show with her character as a divorced woman with three children.
Hunt resisted any change in the show's format - "What drives them crazy," she said, "is that I'm willing to not do the show" - and marvels at the tendency of networks to produce shows to formula. "They want you because you're different," she said, "and then it's, `We've got you, and don't do that.' "
You've probably seen Bonnie Hunt before. On television she was a regular on "Grand" and "Davis Rules." Among her movie credits are "Beethoven" and its sequel and "Rain Man." And she brought her deft touch to the film "Dave," playing the assertive tour guide with the line, "We're walking! We're walking!"
Hunt grew up in Chicago ("I'm prettier in Chicago, and 10 extra pounds are a good thing there"), the sixth of seven children, her father an electrician, her mother employed at one point as an assistant to an NBC executive.
The family lived near Wrigley, not across the street, mind you, but not far away. The setting is important to her: She knocked on the door of an apartment adjacent to Wrigley and asked to videotape the place as a guide to building "The Building" set.
In the '80s there were times when Hunt's work at Second City overlapped her career as a nurse. Her assignments ran to the grim - the emergency room and cancer ward.
Hunt and her husband, John Murphy, a banker, now live in Los Angeles, in a rented apartment, with no heavy mortgage or other Los Angeles anchor. "I want to be able to say no," she said. "It's the biggest luxury you can have in this business."
by CNB