Firing Up The Imagination Felicity, The PJs and Sports Night blazed a trail for offbeat shows. Now, Imagine Television is really heating up with six quirky new pilots BY JEANNE MCDOWELL/LOS ANGELES

On a gray, uncharacteristically chilly day in Los Angeles, David Lynch is perched on a director's chair at the majestic wrought-iron gates to Paramount Pictures, dragging on an American Spirit cigarette and smiling at the video monitor. Lynch is shooting a scene for Mulholland Drive, his new 1-hr. series expected to premiere this fall on ABC. The show follows two women--one an innocent, the other a vixen with a shady past--whose lives intersect in contemporary Hollywood. As the cameras roll, a Yellow taxi drives up, depositing an ethereal-looking blond at the gate. She pauses breathlessly, then struts through--on her way, she hopes, to becoming a star. Six takes later, Lynch is satisfied. "Cut!" he snaps into his bullhorn.

At a cost of $7 million, this is hardly a typical 2-hr. TV pilot. But Lynch isn't your average director-producer; and Mulholland Drive, his first dramatic series since Twin Peaks nine years ago, isn't likely to be just another police or legal drama. And that makes it just the kind of show that is becoming the trademark of Imagine Television.
Imagine is the brainchild of Tony Krantz, Lynch's former agent at Creative Artists Agency, and his partners, producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard, who were behind Apollo 13 and EDtv. It is making a name for itself by recruiting creative wizards like Lynch who have worked mostly in movies and can bring a new sensibility to TV. In its first full season of development Imagine produced three of the most original shows on network television: Felicity, the WB's cinematic coming-of-age drama about a college freshman; Sports Night, a fast-paced half-hour on ABC that mixes comedy and drama to capture the world of an ESPN-like sports show; and The PJs, a foamation series for Fox featuring the voice of its co-creator Eddie Murphy. All three have been renewed for next season, a rare achievement.

The company now has six new pilots in development for next fall, and there's not a standard half-hour comedy among them. "Most people try to sell you a sitcom with a bunch of 26-year-olds living in a Manhattan high-rise, but Imagine is struggling to find interesting shows that others aren't doing," says UPN CEO Dean Valentine.

The networks will announce their fall schedules in three weeks. Lynch's Mulholland Drive is almost sure to get the go-ahead. Imagine's other contenders are Student Affairs, a one-hour tongue-in-cheek soap opera about students at a college in the Midwest that UPN is considering; Thirty, a half-hour comedy-drama hybrid for ABC that shakes up the now familiar Friends formula; Eli's Theory, a half-hour drama for WB about a single father raising his six-year-old genius son; and Agro & York, for Fox, a puppet show set in space. On the drama front, Chicago Hope's Peter Berg, who made his film directorial debut with last winter's dark comedy Very Bad Things, is writing and directing Bellevue, a one-hour drama set in a large psychiatric hospital. Says Krantz: "Our guiding philosophy is to take risk after risk after risk and either go up or down in flames, but to be on fire. TV is ready for a shot in the arm."

Imagine's genre-bending shows are inherently risky, while most prime-time hours are filled with knock-offs of last season's big hits. Seinfeld was off the air less than a year before writer alum Peter Mehlman was back with It's like, you know..., which differs only in that it explores West Coast rather than East Coast inanities (car chases, cell phones and celebrities instead of parking places, subways and Chinese restaurants). "You flip the channels, and everything looks the same," says Thomas Schlamme, who went from directing the critically acclaimed Larry Sanders Show to executive-producing Sports Night. "You get the setup on one channel and the punch line on another." Viewers aren't laughing. Of the 36 prime-time shows that debuted last fall, at least 21 won't be around next September.

Network chiefs, having watched their prime-time audience share erode from 91% for the big-three networks 20 years ago to 60% shared by six of them today, seem too paralyzed to make real changes. "Networks are locked in a box like the rest of corporate America," says Norman Lear, who created All in the Family. "In TV terms that translates into 'Gimme an instant hit' at the expense of every other value, like creativity." Instead of looking beyond Burbank for people with fresh ideas, the networks return to the same talent pool over and over. As Imagine's Grazer puts it, "Everyone is sucking up the same creative oxygen." And too often, when something different comes their way, they turn it down. Case in point: CBS, NBC and Fox passed on The Sopranos before it found a home on HBO, becoming the season's big hit.

What the Imagine partners have going for them, besides their willingness to experiment, is relationships with some of the most creative talents in the business. Krantz, 39, has a killer Rolodex of contacts from his days at CAA and a history of packaging some of TV's biggest deals (teaming Michael Crichton and ER with NBC, for instance). He persuaded Lynch to return to TV and convinced screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The American President) to try the medium for the first time. The result: Sports Night. Krantz and Grazer, 47, so liked the work of screenwriter J.J. Abrams (Regarding Henry) that they bought Abrams' script for Felicity as a TV series after just one read-through. Steve Martin, who worked with Grazer on the 1989 film Parenthood, is developing a half-hour sitcom called Acting Class. And M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart is playing around with ideas for a new series for Imagine.

Imagine (which is in partnership with Disney's Touchstone Television) is also nurturing unknown talent. After seeing The Script Doctor, a short film made for just $150 by the Fields brothers, a Cleveland, Ohio, threesome who worked in their father's wedding-video business, the company hired them to develop Student Affairs. And New York independent filmmaker Noah Baumbach, 29, got a telephone call from Imagine inviting him to pitch TV ideas similar to his chatty, cerebral film comedies (one, Kicking and Screaming, was about a group of guys who graduate from college but won't leave). Baumbach came up with Thirty, based in part on his own life and the lives of his friends.

Since Baumbach had no TV experience, Imagine had to give him a crash course in writing outlines, developing characters and thinking through a season of story "arcs," or plot lines. But his style hasn't been homogenized. Unlike most sitcoms that use three-wall sets, Thirty will shoot on four-wall sets to convey a sense of reality and depth. Eccentric camerawork will swirl around characters and focus on them from odd angles. The network agreed to Baumbach's request to film the show without an audience. But while Baumbach would like to do without a laugh track, the show--like Sports Night--will have one. In any case, innovations don't come cheap. The Thirty pilot cost about $1.9 million, compared with $1.2 million for an average sitcom.

The networks aren't persuaded that such unconventional shows will snare viewers. Sports Night, after all, has been the darling of critics but ranks No. 64 for the season. As for Felicity, despite the appearance of its star, Keri Russell, on at least 10 magazine covers, the show has performed only modestly in the ratings. But Imagine's executives remain confident and argue that given a chance, their shows will build slowly and steadily, much as Seinfeld and Cheers did. If they do, Imagine will get the last laugh--track or no. END