Behind the velvet ropes, Jon Lovitz gabs with comedy power broker Bernie Brillstein among a sea of shark agents. A huge bouncerlike dude with tattoos and a leather vest silently eyes the crowd outside the cordoned-off area. Across the room sit such cutups as Seinfeld's Wayne Knight and Saturday Night Live's Ellen Cleghorne. This is not a Sunset Strip comedy club. It's a filming of NBC's new sitcom NewsRadio at a Sunset Boulevard studio, and what's brought this industry audience together is the aggregation of talent working on the show. Their credits run the gamut of TV yukdom from late-night fixtures (SNL) and critics' darlings (The Larry Sanders Show) to pantheon sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore Show). ''We're the Asia of comedy,'' jokes Dave Foley, referring to the '80s rock supergroup that featured emigres from Yes, ELP, and King Crimson. A member of the absurdist Canadian sketch troupe the Kids in the Hall, Foley stars in NewsRadio as Dave Nelson, a naive Wisconsinite who lands a job at New York City's WNYX. As news director, Dave presides over a madcap staff, including a brownnosing anchorman (SNL alum Phil Hartman), a loose-lipped reporter (The Ben Stiller Show's Andy Dick), and a throaty newswriter (704 Hauser's Maura Tierney), with whom he engages in an awkward office romance. ''I wanted the show to be about what everyone I know does, which is work 12 . or 14 hours a day,'' says executive producer Paul Simms, who left Larry Sanders to create NewsRadio. The plots revolve around the same kinds of common office crises that make Sanders great: hiring, firing, new-desk envy, etc. ''I love Seinfeld, but there are so many Seinfeld rip-offs,'' says Simms. ''I didn't want it to be about a bunch of people who just hang out and don't do anything.'' NBC certainly hopes NewsRadio will do something in the ratings: The show, which premiered March 21, will air its first six episodes in the 8:30 slot of the network's resurgent Tuesday lineup, hammocked between the hits Wings and Frasier. With its impeccable breeding and NBC's TLC, NewsRadio seems to have been born with a silver spoon in its comic mouth. But a closer look at the major players' recent paths shows the series had a somewhat difficult birth.
A 'KID' GROWS UP Dave Foley ran into Paul Simms at the Emmys last year. ''Paul said, 'There's something I want to talk to you about,''' recalls Foley. ''I said, 'I'm going to a party after the show. Why don't you come?''' But when Simms arrived at the Whiskey bar for the William Morris Agency's party for the Kids in the Hall, he was promptly turned away by security guards. An avid Kids fan, Simms had written the lead role in NewsRadio for Foley and wanted to tell him. But when Simms finally called the actor several weeks later, Foley had already agreed to star in a sitcom for Disney. Simms thought he'd have to find another actor, but fate intervened. ''A couple of days into it, (Disney) decided they 'wanted to go a different route,''' says Foley. ''Which is a euphemism for 'They fired me.''' So Foley signed on to NewsRadio, and he says only half-jokingly that he doesn't miss ''all the maneuvering and backstabbing'' that led the Kids to disband their TV series in 1994. (They still have a movie in development at Paramount.) ''We were just five very unpleasant men who each thought he was the only one who was even close to having the right idea.'' He also doesn't miss the cross-dressing that pervaded Kids: ''It's kinda nice to come in and just be a fella for a whole night.'' Now Foley works with real women. ''It's a very pleasant change,'' he says. ''(Kids) was a bit of a boys' club. Maybe we weren't the most masculine boys in the world, but we were all boys.'' NewsRadio marks Foley's most mature role to date (including Julia Sweeney's asexual lover in the movie It's Pat). Says Hartman: ''(Dave) is exploring subtleties in performance that we as his fans have never witnessed before.'' He's also exploring the high-pressure world of prime time. ''The stakes are much higher than our little cult comedy show over there on HBO and late-night CBS,'' Foley admits. ''But I don't feel it that much because the show has a really strong cast. I don't feel like I'm out there trying to carry a show.''
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