• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 6 hours ago

A new NBC sitcom premiering later this month revives memories of the era when the Big Four networks churned out dozens of shows each season and most of them never reached a second season or even a second month.

The new show, titled “Newlyweds,” is a throwback to a certain style of three-camera sitcom that characterized network TV comedy in those bygone days when sitcoms came and went by the ton.

Everything about “Newlyweds” seems plucked from another era.

For openers, its co-creator was fired last week, just two weeks before the show’s scheduled premiere on Oct. 23.

This kind of thing used to happen from time to time in the network TV business of yesteryear. It is never a good sign. 

The fired producer is Gail Lerner, showrunner of “Newlyweds” who co-created the show with Jamie Lee Curtis. Lerner announced her own firing last week on Instagram. 

Lerner said the reason she was given was “creative differences.” She did not say with whom. Lerner lasted through the production of six episodes.

The half-hour “Newlyweds” is about a pair of older adults -- “Jeannie” (played by Tèa Leoni, 60) and “Tony” (Tim Daly, 70) -- who meet on a blind date, hit it off immediately and get married a short time later. Leoni and Daly are married in real-life. 

Apart from he apparent tumult behind the scenes, “Newlyweds” has all the hallmarks and clichés of a sitcom produced in olden days.

For example, it takes less than four minutes into the series pilot for the show’s first reference to a vagina to appear. This is when Jeannie makes a ribald remark about her “yoni” after having sex with Tony. 

I resent having to do this, but I had to look this one up, even though I had a feeling what it was. It is indeed slang for vagina.

If the show has to have a vagina one-liner, why doesn’t the Jeannie character just say “vagina” and get on with it? Plus, I happen to know two men named Yoni. I feel badly for them.

It then took just six minutes for the word “penis” to turn up in the pilot script. It happens as the Tony character settles into a plush, paneled office in Norway (this is too complicated to go into here).

There, he learns from a Norwegian assistant that his upholstered leather desk chair was made from the skin of a whale’s penis. 

Penises, vaginas -- these have been hallmarks of network sitcoms since at least the ’90s or before. No one outside of a sitcom writers’ room knows why.

Speaking of Norwegians, they are the group that comes in for the stereotype treatment in the “Newlyweds” pilot. 

The “ethnic foil” is as old as TV sitcoms. But this was the first time I have ever seen Norwegians cast in the role of target for ethnic comedy.

Here is an old-fashioned sitcom trait that I have not seen in, oh, 30 years or so: The outbreak of clapping and high-spirited “whoo-whoo-ing” when a well-liked or highly anticipated character first appears.

This is the kind of thing that would happen on very old filmed-before-a-live-audience sitcoms such as (if memory serves) “Married, With Children,” for example, when dad Al Bundy entered a scene.

For a time early in the run of “Seinfeld,” studio audiences greeted the entrances of Kramer that way. But after a short time, producers wisely put a stop to it.

Incredibly, however, the same joyous whooping occurs in the “Newlyweds” pilot too when Jamie Lee Curtis makes her first appearance in the role of Tony’s sassy ex-wife, Claudia. 

Perhaps these creative choices were the “creative differences” that the fired former showrunner was referring to.