One of the more pleasant surprises of the new television season is the CBS series "Clubhouse" — a sweet, uplifting, entertaining show about a teenager who hits a grand-slam home run when he gets a job as a bat boy for the major-league team he's rooted for all his life.
But "Clubhouse" (Tuesday, 8 p.m., Ch. 2) is not a show about baseball.
"It will all be there to move the story. It will never be baseball for baseball's sake," executive producer Daniel Cerone said. "The goal was to make Pete Young our window into this team and show a side of the game that people don't normally get to see.
"This is a show set in the world of baseball. Primarily, it's a show about a family with Pete Young (Jeremy Sumpter) at the center of it and how all these various characters influence him as he undergoes essentially a coming-of-age experience."
So when the story is about a steroids scandal or allegations of corked bats, it's really about how Pete reacts to — and grows from — those experiences.
Pete is a good kid whose single mom (Mare Winningham) has struggled to raise him and his older sister (Kirsten Storms), who, unlike her brother, is always pushing the boundaries.
There's a huge fantasy element to the show — you've got to suspend disbelief to accept that the big-time baseball hero (Dean Cain) becomes a big-brother figure to Pete, for example — but "Clubhouse" is done with such heart that, once you accept the premise, it's believable within its own universe. And it's the sort of fantasy universe that we've seen in big-screen films aimed at families.
"His home is on Staten Island because it's that suburban, Steven Spielberg-esque environment that a lot of us grew up in," Cerone said. "And there, sparkling across the bay like Oz, is New York. And we wanted to make this adventure and this journey that this kid takes as big and as epic as possible. There, frankly, is no bigger city or scarier city.
"And on top of that, we have an overprotective mother who wants to hold onto her son as he's making this huge transition into real life."
Unlike most TV teens, Pete not only looks the right age (Sumpter is 15 playing 16), but he acts the right age.
"He is the show and he changed the direction of the pilot a little bit," said Cerone, who discovered that the lines he'd written for his fictional teenager didn't sound right coming out of the mouth of a real teenager.
"I just think we've all been so inured by these self-reflective teenagers on television," he said, referring to their dialogue as "Dawson's Creek speak." "They all talk with the awareness of having, like, 10 years of therapy and being 35 years old. And I had some of those lines in there, and then Jeremy comes in and tries to read them and I'm, like, 'No, no, no, no, no.'
"He keeps us honest. And it was one of the greatest things for the show. It was really mutual, because since then we've just simplified the character because he is a 16-year-old kid and it actually makes the stakes more dramatic. He is Pete Young in every way, shape and form."
The similarities between himself and the character are the reason Sumpter — who was only looking to do movies after starring in last year's theatrical film "Peter Pan" — decided to do a weekly TV series.
"I am Pete Young, and that led me to do the show," said Sumpter, who sounds like any 15-year-old boy when he talks about walking on the field at Dodger Stadium (where "Clubhouse" films its baseball scenes) as "a dream come true." And he can certainly relate to the wide-eyed wonder Pete feels when he steps on the field with the fictional New York Empires.
"I wasn't acting there as much because every time I walk onto the field, I just get the shivers and that thrill of being on a major-league baseball field," he said.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com