It’s Not His ‘Style’ Yet, but It Could Be

Tonight’s new “Style & Substance” seems initially to be just another half-hour piled on prime time’s compost heap of sitcoms, this one a single-joke affair centering on a nationally known homebody of a mogul reputed to be “America’s foremost authority on style and gracious living.”

That joke, of course, is Her Perfectionness, Martha Stewart, whose pervasive public side is the model for Jean Smart’s dominating Chelsea Stevens in this CBS sitcom, which opens mundanely, with a very little bit of the overbearing Chelsea going a long way.

The more episodes you see, though, the funnier and more likable Chelsea and “Style & Substance” get, affirming Smart as a flat-out first-rate actress who is able to excel in just about any venue. In fact, this mid-season series--which co-stars Nancy McKeon as the levelheaded opposite of Smart’s obsessive-compulsive Chelsea--has the potential to become one of TV’s wittier comedies.

Like Stewart, Chelsea is an arbiter of taste and one-woman conglomerate whose attention to the minuscule and trivial has given her a profitable entree into middle-class America. She is also a self-absorbed neatness and control freak who seals herself inside her fastidiously appointed Connecticut farmhouse--an orderly universe of fresh veggies and freshly cut flowers--when not at the office.

It’s there that McKeon’s Jane Sokol, just in from Omaha, is the new business manager and producer of Chelsea’s TV show. And where the staff also includes Heath Hyche as Chelsea’s sweet but incompetent assistant, Terry; Joseph Maher’s effete gay designer, Mr. John; and Linda Kash as Trudy the food maven. Back at the farm, meanwhile, Alan Autry is Earl, Chelsea’s gardener for all seasons.

The pilot episode is a banal get-acquainted session that has the pragmatic Jane finding Chelsea so manipulative and resistant to common sense that she considers returning to Nebraska with her doofus of a boyfriend. Forget it.

Much funnier is the second episode, which finds Jane temporarily bunking at the farm with Chelsea, who remakes her guest’s bed at 5 a.m.--with Jane still in it. And there’s some especially gleaming writing in another coming episode in which Jane must fire Terry and Chelsea has her first encounter--oh, the horror--with a New York subway.

This is quite a skilled cast. Among the supporting players, Maher makes the most of what is essentially a stock stereotype. McKeon does nicely as the antithesis of the big-playing Smart, who, with future scripts in her corner, later infuses Chelsea with a vulnerability that elevates her above the usual bad-behaving diva.

In a scene next week, Chelsea invites Jane into the secret world of her attic, where she has built a miniature hamlet named Chelseatown, an expression of her ideals at once hilarious and just a little sad, if not pathetic. Achieving this delicate balance is rare for sitcoms, raising hopes for “Style & Substance.”

* “Style & Substance” airs tonight at 9:30 on CBS.