Clock Stopper

So much for trying something different in a sitcom: The NBC comedy ''Watching Ellie'' starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus will abandon its real-time element (buh-bye, ticking clock!) and single-camera format and become a traditional four-camera show with a studio audience when it returns for a nine-episode run in March. Louis-Dreyfus says she's fine with changing ''Ellie'' -- the brainchild of her writer husband Brad Hall (''The Single Guy'') -- primarily because she missed the type of experience she had on ''Seinfeld.'' ''Getting a reaction from an audience, that's a hard thing to give up,'' she admits. ''As much fun as shooting a single-camera comedy was, you exist very much in a vacuum.'' Speaking of sucking, Ellie's life as a single L.A. lounge singer won't get much better next season (''there will be a lot of humiliation,'' she promises). Though more viewers watched ''Ellie'' last season (10 million) than the critically acclaimed ''Alias'' (9.7 million) and that other real-time series, ''24'' (8.6 million), there are no guarantees that the changes will ensure a pickup for fall 2003. Louis-Dreyfus isn't stressing. ''I feel much more relaxed,'' she says about the show's second outing. ''Our goal is to simply entertain.'' We'll hold her to that.