• by January 13, 2005

HOW MANY CAST MEMBERS CAN YOU FIT IN A LIVING ROOM? -- David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, the Emmy Award-winning team behind NBC's "Will & Grace," are on a five-city search for "talented men in their mid-20s" to star on their new comedy series "Four Kings," which can best be described as "Friends," but with more male bonding.

An NBC spokesman said that "Four Kings" is loosely based on the friendships of Kohan and Mutchnick. The series, which may be slated for NBC's next fall, is the story of four guys who've been best friends since childhood, who help one another transition "from boyhood to manhood while living in a New York City apartment left to one of them by his grandmother."

Over the past few years, complaints that television comedies weigh too heavily on young twenty-somethings living in New York in an apartment the size of, well, a television studio. This is especially painful to actual young New Yorkers, whose living spaces are more like the size of a large-screen TV set.

Not to sound morbid, but the amount of available grandmothers with large rent-controlled spaces (read: big enough to fit an ensemble cast) in Manhattan are surely dwindling. Fairly soon, the notion of inheriting some conveniently dead relative's domicile will sound as quaint and unrealistic as hearing about the days when one parent stayed home and one went out to work, and both stayed married even though they bickered constantly.

Hence, the days of TV characters living like "Friends" are waning.

Perhaps that's why the search for actors to star in "Four Kings" is taking place outside New York, in Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin and Boston. Perhaps they realize that no New York actor, no matter how well-trained, could pretend to live in a dwelling large enough to hold four normal sized humans at the same time.

Moment of clairvoyance: In the future, in order to survive as a television species, urban ensemble comedies will rely on this motif: twenty-somethings grow up and get married, leaving the large spaces for more affordable confines, while their divorced baby boomer parents take over the sublet living places they in fact grew up in, and allowing the cycle of sitcom life to continue. (Send future royalty checks, Emmy "thank yous" to Real Media Riffs c/o MediaPost, 16 W. 19th Street, New York, NY.)

Post Script: In another sign of times, this is the producers' plea announcing the casting call: "This is a scripted, situation comedy - not a reality program," said Kohan and Mutchnick. "We want to make it clear that we are looking for actors."