Browse the Store, Try the Show

When is a television show like a Utica coat rack? Or a Mission-style plant stand? Answer: When that show is NBC’s “Ed,” a modestly successful new drama and, more important, the first television series based on a boutique chain of home furnishings. Call it Restoration Hardware TV.

On paper, “Ed” is about a New York lawyer who moves back to his Ohio hometown (it’s called Stuckeyville) and takes over the local bowling alley, converting it into a bowling alley/law office (it’s called Stuckey Bowl). Ed is played by Tom Cavanagh, a leaner, less hostile (OK, gentile) version of the character Rob Morrow played on “Northern Exposure.” Dr. Joel Fleischman was the proverbial fish out of water, a driven, fast-rising young doctor forced to do his internship in a kooky Alaskan town where time stood still. Ed, on the other hand, is a fish back in the water-he’s moved home to kooky Stuckeyville in a fit of nostalgia after losing his job and catching his wife in bed with the mailman.

That’s a quaint way to destroy a marriage (the “breakup cute” is evidently the opposite of that romantic comedy staple the “meet cute”). But, then again, everything about “Ed” is quaint-quaint to the point of retro doctrinaire, an appealing attitude at first but ultimately as rigid as Martha Stewart. Watching the show is like browsing through a home bedecked in Restoration Hardware to within an inch of its life.

Calculated to be received as whimsical, “Ed” is television at its most cloying. It’s endearing and clever, but endearing and clever in a way that urges you to realize, constantly: “This show is endearing and clever.” In the ethos of “Ed,” no gesture is too small to be made instantly symbolic or inspired. See Ed throw frozen waffles at the window of his heartsick friend to cheer her up. She’s blond, pert Carol Vessey, the high school crush with whom Ed may get a second chance (but they’re waffling about things). See Ed bring beef jerky to the local district attorney for enduring a date with him. See Ed wear a parka. See Ed and his best friend make $10 dares, as in, “I’ll give you 10 bucks if you go touch that bald guy’s head.”

NBC premiered “Ed” in October. It aired on Sunday nights at 8, where it seemed shy and lonely and vulnerable, a hungry puppy left in the rain (though lying on a smart L.L. Bean doggy bed). Then “Ed” caught a break; on Wednesday nights, NBC was losing face with another new drama, an Aaron Spelling self-sendup called “Titans.” Not only was “Titans” a ratings loser, it seemed a coarse cousin of a lead-in to the network’s most self-important hit, “The West Wing,” Aaron Sorkin’s showy masterwork that re-imagines the White House as a place where staffers toil feverishly at their desks to come up with even better hallway banter than the day before. As on “The West Wing,” no character on “Ed” is too minor to be a mouthpiece for the writer’s look-at-me wit. “I mean, after all, isn’t Tom Green just Lenny Bruce with a video camera?” a side character says in a recent “Ed” episode.

Scheduling “Ed” on Wednesday nights at 8 before “The West Wing” made a tremendous amount of sense, like installing a cappuccino machine at the entrance to a Mommy and Me class in Brentwood.

NBC has built its brand doing this, wrapping escapist yuppie fiction in a look and tone that compel viewers to keep watching. They call it “Must-See TV.” They don’t call it Restoration Hardware TV, because that would imply something, well, too culturally narrow.

But ask Restoration Hardware founder Stephen Gordon to identify the prototypical customer and, not surprisingly, he describes the kind of viewer, the XFL notwithstanding, that approximates the NBC brand: 35 to 55; disposable, dual income; college-educated; well-traveled.

The “Ed’-ness of Restoration Hardware, in fact, can be found right there in the mission statement on the company’s Web site: “Around every corner at Restoration Hardware, you discover something unexpected yet pleasantly familiar,” it says. “Your mind wanders back to your childhood, to the distant past, a history you wish you had and now may create.”

At Restoration Hardware, no object is too incidental to be converted into a slick bit of business, a too-perfect complement to the home. Take shower-curtain rings. “We don’t know who the clever individual was who mounted roller bearings on a shower curtain ring in the 1930s, but it’s still the finest shower ring yet conceived,” says the Restoration Hardware Web site about its $12 beauties.

Ed himself is Restoration Hardware, an attractive piece of distressed furniture with his vintage bowling shirts, V-shaped grin and hair that makes him appear as though he’s just awakened from a nap. You want to buy him and put him in your living room-over there by the framed Kandinsky print or the wrought-iron CD tower.

“Ed” was created by Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman, both former head writers at the “Late Show With David Letterman.” Letterman, whose Worldwide Pants Inc. produces the show with NBC Studios and Viacom Productions, is listed as an executive producer.

The notion that a show as hopeful as “Ed” comes from some facet of Letterman’s psyche is interesting, for he is by many accounts a prolific curmudgeon, perpetually unhappy-a man, in short, without his own private Stuckeyville.

And yet, the show perfectly reflects what you imagine Letterman’s version of paradise to be: a place where cynicism lurks on streets that are otherwise clean, where the homes are sturdy and traditional and the women are apple-cheeked and pretty.

Similarly, anyone who has walked into a Restoration Hardware and been tempted to plunk down $200 on, say, a 92 Court Street Torchiere (it’s a floor lamp) understands the lure of the place. Restoration Hardware isn’t just selling couches, magazine racks and lighting fixtures-it’s selling one’s notion of what a couch, a magazine rack or a lighting fixture should be. It’s not selling a coat rack,it’s selling a Utica coat rack, described as “virtually an American icon,” a piece that “has held generations of hats, scarves, coats ... all manner of wear for all types of folks.”

At Restoration Hardware, in other words, nothing is simply what it appears to be-items have a back story, a touched-up air of history (J. Peterman concocts A and B plots for its merchandise too, but it’s about unleashing the Hemingway in you).

“What kind of store has a riveted aluminum Canadian miner’s lunch pail?” Gordon asks, anticipating the cynic’s approach to his store, founded in 1979. “I started writing signage for each item. The signage was a justification for why the hell something was there.”

Thus, the 92 Court Street Torchiere isn’t just a lamp; it has a legend that you can purchase too. “We lived at No. 66 Court Street,” Gordon writes. “Grandma and Grandpa lived at 92, up the hill in a big brick Gothic. I’d finish the paper route and walk up to their house, catching them at breakfast (intelligently) for my first feeding. This is the fixture, as close as weakened memory will bear, that sat behind my grandfather’s chair. The blown-glass luminaire is graced with a Victorian bronze finish, fluted column and American Gothic detail. Ninety-two Court Street-a noble torchiere that conjures up warm memories for me and is poised to create ones for you too.”

I would buy that lamp. I would buy that lamp, take it home, put it in my living room and wait for the warm memories to start conjuring themselves up. People would come over. Someone would say, “Hey, I like your lamp,” and I would feel good about myself (my first warm memory!). Six months later, I would see that same lamp in someone else’s living room, and only then would the essential betrayal of retail sink in: Restoration Hardware didn’t really have me in mind when selling the 92 Court Street Torchiere; it’s just trying to move as many floor lamps as it can. I would feel stupid, used.

“Whether they want to admit it or not, I believe most of us buy things that we believe communicates something about ourselves to other people,” Gordon says, in defense of the aplomb afforded a floor lamp. “People may take offense to it, but I believe it’s real. I believe ultimately people buy things because of how things make them feel and how they feel about themselves.”

On a recent episode of “Ed,” our hero, 32 and feeling his body in decay, decides to reestablish his youthfulness by mimicking a week in his life when he was 18. He eats two whole pies at a local coffee shop, bowls 50 straight frames, runs to the top of a mountain. Even as I wasn’t buying it, I was buying it. It was in my living room, it was speaking to me, and it was saying: “I’m conjuring up warm memories for me and I’m poised to create ones for you too.”

Me and roughly 11 million others, according to Nielsen Media Research. Eleven million people who might as well be taking advice from a lamp.