Bonnie Hunt

A message to the TV audience: Help save another great show about to go down Cancellation Avenue. "The Bonnie Hunt Show" (Fridays at 8:30 p.m., CBS) is the most original and funniest concept to come along in quite a while. Bonnie Hunt is so unique she alone could carry the show. The supporting cast and the plots are very strong, too. In the Nielsen ratings it is almost dead last and that usually spells doom for a program. Save this show. Watch it. Vince McDonough, Costa Mesa

CBS is getting more eclectic as it seeks to attract younger viewers and shed its reputation for antiquity. Take tonight, for example. The three series that CBS launches are "Dweebs," an uneven, flip-floppy disc of a comedy about computer nerds; "The Bonnie Hunt Show," an amusing, uncommonly bright, urbane and distinctive comedy about a TV reporter, and "American Gothic," a dark, gloomy, largely unrewarding science-fiction drama centering on a sinister sheriff.

Is "The Building" funny? To steal Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray's classic home-run line: It might be, it could be, it is. Part 2 of a Friday double bill of summer comedy premieres on CBS, "The Building" arrives at 9:30 tonight on Channels 2 and 8, a wittily written, precisely executed charmer about a struggling actress named Bonnie who has moved back to her old Chicago apartment overlooking Wrigley Field.

Not only does funny lady Bonnie Hunt star in the new sitcom "The Building," premiering Friday on CBS, she also is the writer and executive producer. And none other than David Letterman is sharing executive-producing chores with her. "The Building" finds Hunt playing Bonnie, a young actress living in an apartment building across the street from the Chicago Cubs' Wrigley Field. The inhabitants of "The Building" are all played by Hunt's friends from Chicago's famed Second City theater company.

Hollywood may have embraced funny lady Bonnie Hunt, but her heart and home are still in Chicago. "Every neighborhood is kind of like Mayberry," says Hunt, who stars as Jonathan Winters' daughter on CBS' "Davis Rules" and currently appears opposite Charles Grodin and a Saint Bernard named Chris in the movie "Beethoven." "In the neighborhood I grew up in we never locked our doors. I grew up with so many things in my personality I wouldn't have had if I hadn't grown up in that neighborhood."