The Akron Beacon Journal from Akron, Ohio • Page 167

The Beacon Journal Page 3 Time is now for show of her own Leifer is producer, star of WB's 'Alright Comedian has worked as a 'Seinfeld' writer As television keeps toying to find new situation comedies, it regularly mines comedy clubs for standup performers around whom series can be built. Carol Leifer, who has had a successful standup career, could easily have had a sitcom of her own count store with a giant package of toilet paper. A subplot has Carol's sister, who lives with her parents, becoming ever more like the retirees she is hanging out with. In the second show, Carol pretends to have a baby in her apartment to get the neighbors to turn the music down. Renee has told her latest swain that she loves him, and is desperate to get him to say it back.

Does it work? The second episode was not great, with Carol forced into an escalating series of lies to no great comic effect. The pilot is still hard to judge, since about a third of it was unavailable for preview because scenes were being reshot. Alright Already fits its characters together well enough and there are some nice touches, notably in Carol's encounters with her parents. But it does not seem all that inventive, or all that funny. Maybe Leifer didn't have as many ideas saved up as she thought.

R.D. Heldenfels before now. But instead of plunging into a new field and looking to others to guide her, Leifer sent herself to sitcom school. Amy Yasbeck, left, who plays Renee, and Carol Leifer, who plays Carol Lerner, star In the new sitcom Alright Already. R.D.

Heldenfels writes about television for the Beacon Journal. He can be reached at She became a writer and producer for Seinfeld, where the character of Elaine Benes is loosely based on Leifer, who was romantically linked to star Jerry Seinfeld at one time. Then she moved on to The Larry Sanders Show as a writer and producer before finally taking on her own sitcom, Alright Already, which premieres Sunday on The WB. "I wanted to write a show that I could be in and produce," Leifer said recently. "It was something that I've wanted to and coping with the eccentricities of her parents (Jerry Adler and Mitzi McCall), sister (Stacy Galina) and brother (Maury Sterling), as well as facing the social whirl with her man-hungry friend Renee (Amy Yasbeck).

"I really wanted to write a show about a family, a real family where the parents are not secondary characters," said Leifer. "I like adult children with their parents. I think there's nothing funnier than those kinds of stories." Leifer, who wrote some of the Costanza family battles on Seinfeld, draws on stories about her own Long Island family for ideas for Alright Already. For example, she once invited her parents out to Los Angeles and they turned her down. "I said, 'Look, I'll buy you a first-class said Leifer.

"And my father said, 'Carol, first class? We're not Indeed, as one reporter pointed out, Leifer will now have two characters in prime time based on herself, Carol Lerner and Elaine Benes. Still, she said, "There is a giant difference between me and the character of Elaine. I'm not making 600 grand an episode." More seriously, Leifer added there were limits to what she could do on Seinfeld, where the show was not about Elaine but "the three guys and Elaine." "Elaine has her voice every week but it's great now to have a lot of different characters to give voices to a lot of story ideas that I've had for a long time," she said. And what are those ideas? The pilot has Carol interested in a man, only to worry when he sees her coming out of a dis do since I was a stand-up comedian. I felt with the opportunity at Seinfeld, that it would be a good training ground to learn how to have your own show.

I mean, a lot of standups get a show, but I don't think they know the nuts and bolts, the working pieces behind it. "This way, when I went to develop my own show, I felt like I had some sense of what a TV show is about," Leifer said. In Alright Already, Leifer plays Carol Lerner, an unmarried woman living in Florida On the cover Carol Leifer takes on her own sitcom, Alright Already, which premieres Sunday on The WB..