Wednesday, May 30, 2002

Jim's Fleeting Moment . . .
by Jason Gay

TV is a nasty, nasty business. It will pick you up, stick your pretty mug in the pages of magazines and then promptly toss you into the gutter, giving you a swift kick just to make sure you're down.

Ask Jim Gaffigan. The tall, blond-haired, bespectacled comedian from Indiana struck TV gold a while back when fellow Hoosier David Letterman plucked him, Lana Turner–style, out of the yuk-yuk pastureland and developed a sitcom around him called Welcome to New York.

Welcome to New York -- in which Mr. Gaffigan played an out-of-town weatherman at a fast-paced Manhattan news outfit headed by Christine Baranski -- debuted on CBS in the fall of 2000. It got an O.K. time slot, Wednesday nights at 8:30, up against then-juggernaut Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but tucked behind Bette, the Bette Midler sitcom that CBS was hyping like the eighth wonder of the comedic world.

Well, you know what happened next. Bette started out well but quickly bombed, to the point where even Ms. Midler got sick of it. By then, it was clear that Welcome to New York -- which received fairly favorable reviews -- was pretty much doomed, too. It shuffled around, stopped, then came back before disappearing entirely. You know, just like David Cone's slider.

But Mr. Gaffigan didn't pack up his gunnysack and head back to the sticks. No, he came back strong. In fact, Mr. Gaffigan has recently had a TV resurrection that would have made Lazarus or David Caruso proud. He landed a co-starring role on Ellen DeGeneres' new CBS sitcom, The Ellen Show, set to premiere this fall. And these days, he's on your tube every other minute, it seems, as the "dorky white guy" (his words) sandwiched between Derek Jeter and Nomar Garciaparra in those Fleet bank commercials.

"Yeah, I feel incredibly lucky," Mr. Gaffigan said of his quick comeback. "I think the odds of that are pretty slim."

Mr. Gaffigan said he felt proud about Welcome to New York, even if the show was vaporized in its first season. "Being a comedian from Indiana and having Letterman show the interest that he did was pretty incredible, even if it hadn't gone anywhere," he said. "And as an actor and a comic, the fact that it was a sitcom that I wasn't embarrassed about was a major accomplishment."

Speaking of shows to be embarrassed about -- Mr. Gaffigan was asked if he thought Bette's disastrous run prematurely torpedoed his show. He politely refrained from bashing Ms. Midler, but he agreed that Welcome to New York might have performed better on another night. "I would say that if it had the Monday-night 8:30 slot [between King of Queens and Everybody Loves Raymond], it probably would have been an easier road to hoe," he said. "It's weird, it's like, you know, if -- here, hold on -- heh, heh, Jeannie, leave me alone!

"Sorry," Mr. Gaffigan said, returning to the phone. "My girlfriend."

Well, it certainly is good to be Jim Gaffigan these days! As for those ubiquitous Fleet ads, Mr. Gaffigan became the 4,345,455th person to pour praise upon the hunky Mr. Jeter and Mr. Garciaparra. "Even if you're just a mediocre baseball fan, you know you are sitting there with the Mickey Mantles of today," he said. "It was pretty cool. I don't know about you, but I have encountered some athletes, and even when they are trying to hide their egos, it kind of leaks through -- but [Mr. Jeter and Mr. Garciaparra] are pretty humble."

In the ads, now running in the New York and Boston areas, a clueless Mr. Gaffigan pesters Mr. Garciaparra and Mr. Jeter about online banking in a neighborhood coffee shop. They're pretty good. The only thing is, right now they're on TV, like, 12 bazillion times a day. Mr. Gaffigan sounded bemused. "I had no idea it was going to be on every five seconds," he said. "You'd think Fleet was taking over the world! It's kind of scary."