Supporting Actors Prop Up the Show In NBC's '30 Rock'

That could almost be Fey talking about her sitcom at some point in the future.

For all the rewriting and reworking, the show needs a better premise and funnier dialogue and, most of all, a more commanding performer in the starring role.

'Twenty Good Years'

There certainly is no hint of innovation in "Twenty Good Years," the NBC sitcom (debuting tonight) that teams esteemed old pros John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor. But there is something brave about the show: It dares not to concern itself with the world of hip, young quipsters. Flying in the face TV's usual demographic obsessions, the two main characters are daringly older.

They are turning 60, that milestone that makes all previous milestones -- turning 30 or 40, for instance -- look like walks in the park. Turning 60 is more like a walk on a narrow ledge high, high up. As Lithgow, playing a zany surgeon, tells Tambor, playing a somewhat stuffy judge: "How many good years do you think we have left on this planet? Twenty at best."

The pilot sets up the premise: to make those 20 years wild and crazy, at least as wild and crazy as nature and their arteries will allow. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the pilot is directed by Terry Hughes, who guided "The Golden Girls" through so many hilarious romps. These are "The Golden Guys," two longtime pals who bicker and quibble and are, for all practical purposes, partners in a platonic marriage. Actually, the surgeon had three non-platonic marriages and all failed, so this is the most successful relationship of his life.

Naturally, Lithgow is over the top from the word "go," just as he was for the entire run of the broad farce "3rd Rock From the Sun." But "Twenty Good Years" has the chance to be more than farce if the writers would stop now and then to confront the terrifying truths in Lithgow's observation about life expectancy.

With Lithgow bouncing off the walls, floor and ceiling, Tambor gets to underplay, and he does it affectingly, bringing to life a character who is much different from the shameless goof he played on HBO's unforgettable "Larry Sanders Show" with Garry Shandling.

The laughs generated are not subtle, but at least they're there. And for all his sometimes embarrassing excess, Lithgow has moments that are elegant in their way -- elegantly insane, elegantly silly, elegantly indulgent.

Lithgow: "I used to play the saxophone."

Tambor: "You were terrible."

Lithgow (petulantly): "It's an unforgiving instrument."

Somehow, Lithgow's line reading makes such dialogue funnier than it ought to be. Tambor is no straight man to a comic genius, however, and makes a solid impression with far fewer decibels and much less mugging.

"Twenty Good Years" isn't likely to be included in a lecture series on "The Art of the Sitcom" (and there is one -- an art, I mean), but it delivers the goods, and in a rowdy, traditionalist way that has become shockingly scarce on the tube. So much so that people have had to go to TV Land in search of it.

Not anymore.

30 Rock (30 minutes) premieres at 8 tonight on Channel 4; Twenty Good Years (30 minutes) premieres at 8:30 tonight on Channel 4.