As the television season moves through its midway point, viewers checking out four shows premiering next week may get triple vision:
* A new NBC comedy revolves around two young guys and a young woman who are all best friends and live in the same house.
* A new ABC comedy revolves around two young guys and a young woman who are all best friends and live in the same apartment building.
* A new Fox drama features two young guys and a young woman who are all best friends and live in close proximity to one another.
* And ABC has another new comedy with two women and a man in their early 30s who live together in the same house. In this case, the man is married to one woman and is mortal enemies with the other--his sister-in-law.
The triple threats kick off Monday with the debut of "House Rules" on NBC, continue Tuesday with ABC's "That's Life" and end up Wednesday with the overlapping premieres of Fox's "Significant Others" and ABC's "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place."
Some of the producers and creators of the "trio" shows are taken aback by the sameness of the premises. "I am never in favor of simultaneous similarities. TV is the same enough as it is without going out of its way to be so," said Chris Thompson, executive producer of "House Rules." "It's disappointing and oddly disturbing."
But they insisted that viewers will easily be able to distinguish the programs. Said Danny Jacobson, executive producer of "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place": "It's never about the concept. It's about the execution."
Still, the concepts of the shows collide on several fronts:
With the exception of "That's Life," ABC's blue-collar comedy about a married couple and the tension that erupts when an in-law moves in, the main characters in "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place," "Significant Others" and "House Rules" are single, in their 20s and looking for true love. The men in "Two Guys" and one of the men in "House Rules" are students. The women in "Two Guys" and in "House Rules" are holding down professional positions (one's an attorney; the other's a seller of chemicals).
More important, the two men-one woman friendships in those shows are stabilized by their nonromantic nature. And the strength of the friendships is counterbalanced by the lack of success of love affairs outside the platonic "triangles."
