If at first or second - you don't succeed, try, try again.
That may well be John Larroquette's motto these days, as his self-titled sitcom goes into its third season on NBC. Many (if not most) TV observers didn't expect the show to still be around."The John Larroquette Show" debuted in the fall of 1993 opposite ABC's "Roseanne" - which beat the stuffing out of it.
A year later, it got beat up by "Grace Under Fire."
Now the show has been relegated to Saturday nights - sort of the black hole of network television. Even Larroquette admitted it was a "close call" on renewal. And while he's happy to be back, he's ambivalent about his new time slot.
"It's sort of like giving with one hand and taking away with the other, knowing that on Saturday . . . there's just not nearly as much of an audience available," he said in a recent telephone interview. "This show has got a lot of legs to it. I don't know if it will ever be a top 10 show. It will certainly never be on Saturday night.
"But what I have to concentrate on is doing the best show I can and winning the time slot. If I can do that then I can turn to (NBC Entertainment President) Warren (Littlefield) and say, `Get me the heck out of here.' "
For the second time in as many seasons, "Larroquette" is undergoing changes. And for the second time , the show will tone down its portrayal of the main character, John Hemingway, as an alcoholic.
"It certainly went through a lot of metamorphoses," Larroquette said. "There's no doubt that in the first year of the show viewership declined. And I can't blame all of that on `Roseanne.' I approached this guy and his problem of being a drunk head on, and I think I missed the mark to some degree."
Indeed, the show was very dark.
And the setting - in a St. Louis bus station in the middle of the night - didn't help much either.
Larroquette, who became a star and won four Emmys for his role as Dan Fielding on the hugely popular "Night Court," admits that he was "trying to be as far away from the guy I did for nine years as I could."
"I think if my show had come on the air and I had been close to who Dan Fielding was, I don't think we'd have any close calls. I think it's what America got used to for almost a decade with me. But it's taking them a while to catch up with this guy," he said.
While the cast of the show will remain intact, several changes are in the offing. Hemingway is going to break up with Catherine (Alison LaPlaca) in the show's two-part season opener. She's going to buy the bar at the bus station from Carly, and open a jazz club. The change is a way to involve Catherine with the rest of the cast.
"It posed a problem for me, in that we were trying to do two shows," Larroquette said. "We were trying to do the domestic comedy at home with them and the workplace comedy with the gang. That's very difficult to do."
That work environment is changing, too. The staff will be working an earlier shift, beginning at 3 p.m.
Overall, Larroquette sees the changes as part of a natural evolution.
"I'm not reinventing the show every year," he said. "We have the same cast, the same workplace, the same people. Their environment has not changed. Their relationships, in essence, have not changed." Still, he doesn't profess to be completely happy with where the show is.
"We are still trying to find it, in a way," he said. "I don't know if it's a show in search of an audience or if the audience is still searching for this show."