BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Poor Paula Marshall. She's one of the most successful failures on television.
One of the stars of the new CBS sitcom "Out of Practice," which debuts Sept. 19, Marshall gets cast in a lot of TV shows. A whole lot.
Problem is, the shows don't last long. It's been a few episodes and out with shows such as "Wild Oats," "Chicago Sons," "Cupid," "Snoops," "Cursed" and "Hidden Hills."
It's certainly not nice, but she is widely known in TV circles — at least TV critic circles — as a show killer. It's something she's well aware of; Marshall used the term herself without anyone else mentioning it.
"I kind of feel like, even though we've done a few pilots, it means something. It means we're good, dammit!" she said. "And I don't feel like I'm a show killer, although Entertainment Weekly will argue that."
(That weekly entertainment magazine is sooooo mean to have put that in print. The rest of us were at least polite enough to simply say it behind her back.)
And Marshall isn't the only one. Her "Out of Practice" co-star, Christopher Gorham, "actually e-mailed me a bunch of fake questions that you guys were going to have for me, like, 'So, Paula, you've killed every show you've been on — what makes you think anything different is going to happen with this one?'
"And, 'What happed to your talent?' "
It's not fair to blame Marshall for the failure of any of those shows. Some of them were just bad shows; others were good shows in bad time slots; others . . . well, there's just no logic as to why some TV shows succeed and others fail.
"A lot of shows, like 'Cupid,' that I loved with all my heart, it shouldn't have been canceled," Marshall said. "And I don't understand that. . . . I don't think I was ever responsible for anything being canceled. I feel really fortunate that people keep hiring me. People think I have talent."
She's become accustomed to having her hopes raised by each new show and dropped when the shows get canceled. And it's led to more than a bit of uncertainty.
"It's frustrating because I never know when I can do the kitchen over. I never know when that money is going to come in that I can actually afford to do my kitchen over. I do a half a season and a half a season."
Still, once again, she's happy to have been cast in "Out of Practice," playing the lesbian daughter of Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler.
"Every time I do something, maybe it's led me here," she said. "I had a big crush on (Winkler) when I was little. So I think it's really cool.
"I think probably more than you I'm happy that I get to do this, and I do it a lot," Marshall said. "And you guys are probably bored of me, but maybe this one will stick."
MARSHALL MAY BE a show killer, but her new TV father, Henry Winkler, inadvertently inspired the TV phrase "jump the shark" — which is the point at which a series crosses the line into something unwatchable.
Back on "Happy Days," there was an episode in which Fonzie (Winkler) ski jumped over a shark — thus "jump the shark." (And you can check out when, exactly, shows did that at the very entertaining Web site jumptheshark.com.)
Winkler, that cad, sort of blamed the whole thing on his parents.
"My parents were from Germany, and I was a water-ski instructor as a counselor at camp. And they would say to me, 'Tell zem you vater ski. Zis vill be good for the Fonz,' " Winkler said.
And he defended both the show and the episode.
"You forgot one thing. When we jumped the shark, we went on for six (more) years," Winkler said.
Which misses the point. A show doesn't go off the air when it jumps the shark, it just runs out of quality.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com