NNTN is based on the BBC comedy Not the Nine O'Clock News, brought to the U.S. in 1980 by Emmy-winning producer/director John Moffitt, a Dartmouth-educated veteran producer whose credits go back to the Ed Sullivan Show. Moffitt and co-producer Pat Tourk Lee preside over a bright, youngish, six-member repertory cast with roots in places like Saturday Night Live and Chicago's Second City comedy troupe. Most of them are university graduates and two hold Masters degrees.
     Moffitt ws producing Fridays (since dropped) for ABC when, while traveling abroad, he discovered and bought the rights to Not the Nine. ABC, he recalls in a slightly bemused tone, didn't know what to do with it, so I took it to Home Box Office.
     HBO went for the idea in seven minutes flat, an executive says, "to prove, if nothing else, that pay-tv isn't all T&A." The series made its debut last January. Eighteen new episodes were ordered for 1984 after a Nielsen rating showed NNTN ranked second among all comedies watched in the 12.5 million homes that then subscribed to HBO.
     NNTN is probably the fastest-paced comedy show ever to ignite the tube. Each half hour contains up to 45 different segments ranging from reasonably topical satire to sketches that defy description. "If you didn't like what you just saw," Moffitt likes to say, "hang on. There'll be another one in 15 seconds."

He is in the living room of his woodsy suburban home tucked into a corner of the San Fernando Valley. It is also the shooting location for that day's production of NNTN, a day that began before dawn and would not end until well after dark.
     Outside, cast members Anne Bloom and Mitchell Laurance are shooting a skit that parodies the coffee commercial whose solution to any domestic crisis lies in a cup of the advertiser's brew.
     To Laurance's outraged accusation: "You phoned my boss and told him I'm impotent!", stage-wife Bloom replies sweetly, "Let's have some coffee." "You spent my life savings on gifts for your lesbian lover!" "It'll make you feel so much happier and relaxed." As they walk off, a voice croons, "Times like these were made for Tasty Choice."
     "We're not Dynasty" Laurance says, "but we have a ball. We have that little gleam. . . ."
     The little gleam goes beyond the set among the high-spirited Not Necessary Players, as they call themselves. Laurance was the white-robed Gandhi in an NNTN movie promo called Gandhi Loves Tootsie, an elemental romance that promises "Love means never having to say you're sari." Tootsie was played by pudgy Stuart Pankin, who was dressed, naturally, in dowdy woman's clothing.
     After shooting the segment, they wandered arem in arm - still costumed - through the bustling Los Angeles area of Westwood, window-shopping for dresses and looking for reaction. "I guess we forgot we were in L.A.," New York-born Laurance says. "No one noticed us."
     Inside Moffitt's living room, an assistant director is calling "Quiet on the set! Quiet in the kitchen! Quiet in the back bedroom!" The kitchen is for makeup, the bedroom for costume changes.
     When the noise continues, player Audrie Neenan assumes a Rodney Dangerfield grimace and pleads, "A little respect!" That does the job.
     They are shooting a segment called The Big Deal, which spoofs the movie "The Big Chill, " a reunion of 1960s radicals 20 years later. In addition to Neenan, four others gather around the sofa: Pankin, Bloom, Laurance and Danny Breen, whose credits, he will tell you, include "clubs, colleges and cowboy bars."

A coffee table is littered with liquor bottles and drugs. Pankin has just finished shooting something called Fruitcake Alert and is being unwired by a soundman. "You've had your hand down my shirt more than my wife," Pankin tells him, then entertains everyone with a sleight-of-hand coin trick.
     Nearby, writer David Hurwitz watches. He was a Ph.D. candidate in math until he decided the most he would ever be was an assistant professor at Penn State, so he gave it up for comedy writing.
     "I can't do immediate stuff like I used to," Hurwitz says, recalling a stint on Saturday Night Live. "We have a two-month lead time here so we have to go with things we have confidence in, like war and unemployment. But the freedom to write is so much greater on NNTN. I remember once on Saturday a writer used the phrase 'sex with a vegatable.' A guy from standards and practices began breaking it down. I couldn't believe it." He mimics the censor: "Sex with broccoli is OK, but . . ."
     The Big Deal is about to be shot, except the script calls for Danny Breen to be holding a marijuana cigarette. They need a prop. "Anyone here know how to roll a joint?" director Hoite Caston asks. The response is almost a routine in itself. "Not me," Breen says innocently, "but I can make cocoa." "Or a peanut-butter sandwich," someone else adds. "Or cookies." A prop (well, it seemed lie a prop) appeared and the segment was shot with professional élan.
     The cast isn't always happy. They gripe especially over the fact that the show consists of more film footage than acting.
     "Footage is the real star," huffs Stuart Pankin, "not us."
      Writer Hurwitz agrees. "I wrote one sketch where Stu only had one word to say. 'Soon.' That's not exactly a part on Remington Steele."
      Probably the best know of the cast members, from multiple appearances on The Tonight Show, is 29-year-old Rich Hall, who built a Seattle street act with a ceramic toad into what Moffitt calls "a strange and eerie brand of comedy."
      Wry and iconoclastic, Hall writes as well as performs and is responsible for the creation of NNTN's "sniglets" - words that ought to be in the dictionary but aren't. "Squark," for instance, which is the white dot that stays on your screen after the set has been turned off; or "aquadextrous," the ability to turn bathtub faucets off with your toes.
      Hall came up with idea for sniglets while double-checking to make sure a letter he'd just mailed had gone down into the mailbox ("premblememblemation"). He began asking for audience contributions and over the past year has received about 20,000. He feels, well, saturpostalated.

All of this sass and nonsense, which head writer Matt Neuman calls a cross between Benny Hill and Jonathan Swift, sits well with television critics, who generally like the show. "It's like a Sam Donaldson secret fantasy come true," says one. "Even funnier than the real news," says another. On the other hand, a Minneapolis critic (no doubt with a bad stomach) finds NNTN in the hands of writers and performers "who clearly can't tell a good comedy concept from a bad one."
     Probably the best evaluation came from NNTN's costume coordinator Maryann Bozek that day in Moffitt's home. "The things are funny all right," she said, watching the action. "I like the family scenes best. But when they ate a wren for their Thanksgiving turkey, that offended me. Can you imagine eating a wren?"