With “Friends” and “Frasier” ending their long runs this season, the beleaguered sitcom genre will suffer a double blow. Now uncertainty is clouding two more hit comedies, CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond” and NBC’s “Will & Grace.”
“Raymond” star Ray Romano said last week that there would be “no quick resolution” to the question of whether he and executive producer Phil Rosenthal would return to the series for a ninth and final season or call it quits in May. NBC, at the same time, is locked in a nasty legal dispute with the “Will & Grace” creators.
Such problems with well-recognized hits are anything but good news for broadcasters already reeling from serious prime-time ratings declines this season.
Aaron Kaplan, co-head of television at the William Morris Agency, said it’s “a big enigma” why new sitcoms have failed to break through recently, although he also noted the genre has gone through boom-and-bust cycles in the past. Kaplan’s agency represents Romano, but he declined to comment on that situation.
In their syndication afterlife, some sitcoms remain extremely popular on local stations and cable outlets such as TV Land. “The reruns of ‘Seinfeld’ sometimes beat the ratings for original series in their slots,” Kaplan said.
That helps explain why the problems with “Raymond” and “Will & Grace” loom large.
In the case of “Raymond,” time is running out, because writers need to start working on a finale if the series is going off the air. The producers are insisting on making far fewer than the 22 episodes usually delivered to the network each season, says one person close to the show.
Moreover, in early negotiations, Romano’s representatives have pressed for a per-episode fee of $4 million, according to sources. That would more than double the actor’s salary and make him the highest-paid series lead in TV history. Romano’s representatives would not comment on the figure.
A different problem is afflicting “Will & Grace,” which is almost certain to return to NBC’s schedule next season. NBC is battling with the sitcom’s creators, the writing team of David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, who want to come back and run the series in September after a couple of seasons tending to NBC’s ill-fated comedy “Good Morning, Miami.”
But NBC is upset because Kohan and Mutchnick filed a lawsuit in December alleging that the network’s production arm cheated them out of millions of dollars in potential profits from distribution of the hit show in off-network syndication. NBC executives have told the duo that as long as the lawsuit is pending, they are not welcome back to oversee “Will & Grace.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
