DOUBLE DUTY Some of TV's top producers may be biting off more than they can chew. David E. Kelley can juggle The Practice and Ally McBeal all the way to the Emmys and the Golden Globes, but for many a show runner it's tough enough keeping one series humming, let alone two or three. Still, most find that the possibility of making lightning strike again is impossible to resist. Producers expanding their workloads include
-- The Drew Carey Show cocreator Bruce Helford, who has SNL expat Norm Macdonald playing a hockey player-turned-social worker for The Norm Show, debuting March 24 on ABC;
-- Just Shoot Me creator Steven Levitan, who will take a whack at Stark Raving Mad, about a best-selling horror novelist and his editor, for NBC this fall;
-- Chris Keyser and Amy Lippman, the Party of Five creators who, besides developing a Party spin-off for Jennifer Love Hewitt, are working on a fall police drama for CBS;
-- X-Files' Chris Carter, who hasn't had much luck with second child Millennium but will try a third sci-fi hour called Harsh Realm for Fox next season.
Even the tireless Kelley is tempting fate with Snoops for ABC, in which he'll try to do for private eyes what Ally McBeal does for attorneys. Kelley has already said he won't be as involved in Snoops as he is in Practice and Ally -- most likely a concession to reality. Recently, Steven Bochco's production company had three shows on the air -- NYPD Blue and fresh entries Brooklyn South and Total Security. The new shows never caught fire, and NYPD Blue suffered creatively. ''It just wasn't in us,'' David Milch, Bochco's collaborator, recently said. ''If [Brooklyn South] was the only show we were working on, it would be on the air. We would have made it work.''
''The key to handling more than one show,'' says Just Shoot Me's Levitan, ''is to make sure the first show has found its voice and is staffed with talented people who have mastered that voice.'' For Levitan that means not raiding Shoot's staff for Stark Raving Mad. But it's a rule that can't apply to the honcho himself, which prompts fellow show helmer Keyser to ask, ''At what point are you stretched too thin?''
That's what the networks, which greenlight such further adventures, wonder as well. ''We're always leery,'' says ABC Entertainment president Jamie Tarses, ''particularly if the person responsible for writing the show has other priorities. Sometimes you're the beneficiary, sometimes you get damaged.'' She's not worried about Kelley, though: ''We know he takes a lot of pride in what he does. We won't get a ton of David for Snoops, but we'll get enough.'' Let's hope so.
-- AND SO ON Kyra Sedgwick has signed with Disney's Touchstone TV to develop her own series.... Hyperion Bay evaporates after March 8, making room for Aaron Spelling's newest squad, the L.A. paramedics of Rescue 77.... ABC is slating another mid-season replacement in addition to The Norm Show: Seinfeld vet Peter Mehlman's ensemble comedy It's Like, You Know... will debut March 24.
