INK, THE NEW CBS SITCOM STARRING Ted Danson as a big-city newspaper columnist and Mary Steenburgen as his ex-wife and new managing editor, has not had an easy time of it. The pilot was deemed a misfire by both the network and its married-in-real-life stars. Ink's debut was pushed back from Sept. 16 to Oct. 21; Diane English, creator of Murphy Brown, swooped in to oversee a complete renovation. And a highly polished piece of work it is. The premiere episode betrayed not a note of desperation. Danson, who has chucked his toupee and now allows the studio lights to dance off his bald spot, rolls out the charm with a vigorous flourish, like an upholsterer unfurling a bolt of rare cloth. Ink also boasts English's typically confident supporting players, including Christine Ebersol as a dipsomaniacal society reporter. Highly theatrical and blaringly loud, she seems to have wandered in from a '50s musical comedy.
Ink (which airs Mondays at 8:30 p.m. ET) is so smoothly done, in fact, it is hard to say yet whether it is actually funny. It is more like something you would beam to outer space with a label explaining to aliens that this is how humans assemble a sitcom. The one fresh, intriguing element is Steenburgen, making her series debut. Anyone who has seen her movies, from 1980's Melvin and Howard through last year's Nixon, knows that she is an actress who defies convention. She can come across as scrappy, down-to-earth, neurotically frail and delicately sexy all at the same time. Her voice is unmusical, nasal and thin, but commanding. Putting this sort of ineffable talent into a show as precision-tooled as Ink is risky. In the debut episode, when Steenburgen delivered an impromptu speech introducing herself to the newsroom, it actually felt unrehearsed. But given a monologue that would have been a bravura scene in the hands of a sitcom veteran—a phone conversation with a mad bomber—she seemed to be fighting off hiccups.
Her chemistry with Danson, not surprisingly, is good. As Ink develops, maybe some of his sitcom zing will rub off on her. And maybe he will pick up some of her unforced comic presence.
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