Tony winner

Five years ago, Clark was working on a pilot for NBC called Social Studies, in which he was to play a naive, socially conscious fraternity brother at a college outside Boston. NBC ultimately passed, but he seems to have reworked the premise for Boston Common, his NBC sit-com that debuts next Thursday (March 21, 8:30 p.m. on Channel 7). Created by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, writers for The Single Guy (which Boston Common will replace for the next six weeks), the show is a loose, shambling affair, but one that could well provide him with the showcase for inspired silliness that is his trademark.

The show is certainly tailor-made to fit his background. Like Clark himself, his character, Boyd Pritchett, comes from Gladys, Virginia. Clark once told me that growing up there "definitely gave me a sense of humor. If I didn't laugh, I'd burst into tears at any moment. No one in my family had ever gotten out of there." In the show, Boyd and his younger sister, Wyleen (Hedy Burress), yearn to get as far away from Gladys as possible. Boyd drives Wyleen to Boston, where she will be a freshman at an Emerson-like Back Bay college called Randolph Harrington (she's the naive student that the now 32-year-old Clark might have played five years ago), where she hopes to study communication, transform herself into an urban sophisticate, and have lots of sex. But the overprotective Boyd horns in on her apartment and her campus life when the college offers him a job as a handyman. He'll get to escape Gladys, watch over Wyleen, and flirt with Joy (Traylor Howard), a pretty, workaholic graduate student who seems interested in Boyd mostly as an anthropological specimen of an exotic culture.

It's not much of a premise, but at least it's unique. Boston Common is certainly not a Friends clone; the only element it shares with the rest of the Thursday night NBC line-up is its fantasy apartment. (During their first hour in Boston, Wyleen and Boyd manage to find a cheap, giant, furnished loft on Comm Ave.) The level of local color is one step above generic. The student union, the show's primary set, certainly looks right: messy and plastered with posters and flyers (including one advertising the Phoenix). Although the Bostonian characters lack distinctive accents (like the characters on the last NBC sit-com set in these parts, Cheers), they all do accurately represent the citizenry as world-class complainers. There's the hypochondriac supervisor who hires Boyd, a pretentious young professor with spectacular hair, a witheringly sarcastic and supremely unhelpful information-desk staffer named Tasha (Tasha Smith), and a dour new neighbor named Leonard (Mad About You scribe Steve Paymer), whom Boyd likens to Eeyore.

Besides helping to make the show less Friend-ly, all that New England surliness creates a useful foil to Boyd's sunny personality. The show provides an open-ended forum for Clark to go off on tangents that recall his brilliant stand-up material. As with Clark's on-stage persona, Boyd's apparent hayseed ingenuousness disarms the city slickers when he unleashes his gifts for quick repartee and surrealist flights of fancy. In the pilot episode, Clark does a brilliant riff on why Boyd's mother put a microwave oven in her bathroom (an explanation that begins, "You never know when you'll have to heat up a muffin"), and another on Boyd's old job at Tastee-Freez, where he once stuck his mouth under the soft-serve spigot and gave himself an ice-cream headache that lasted seven months. Whereas the venomous streak in many Boston-bred comedians working in sit-coms (Kevin Meaney, Lenny Clarke, Janeane Garofalo, Jonathan Katz) suits them better in supporting and straight-man roles than leads, Clark gets to show off a sly playfulness, a kind of twisted glee, that should make Boston more than common.