‘Dream’ Team Taps Into Challenge of Networking : Television: The folks behind HBO’s racy series tone it down for CBS’ ‘Family Album.’

Talk about different sensibilities.

The creative team behind “Dream On,” the racy HBO series about a divorced man with an active sex life, is now producing the CBS family sitcom “Family Album,” centering on the living-room antics of a multi-generational family.

“The particular challenge is that it’s a family comedy and we never saw ourselves doing a family comedy,” said Marta Kauffman, who created both “Family Album” and “Dream On” with her longtime writing partner, David Crane.

Because “Dream On” is on non-commercial HBO, where viewers pay to receive the programming and are used to the language and nudity of R-rated films, Kauffman and Crane could depict the unclothed exploits of their main character, Martin Tupper, and could present serious subjects such as AIDS in a way that series TV does not normally do.

“On ‘Dream On,’ we were setting out with every episode to do something strange, or disturbing, or shocking, all the things that are very dangerous on network television,” Crane said. “All the things you can’t do on network television.”

Because CBS is a broadcast network, using the public airwaves and depending on advertisers to pay the bills, the healthy sex life between “Family Album’s” two main characters, played by Peter Scolari and Pamela Reed, is “more covert, more implied rather than stated,” Crane said.

“Family Album” has been struggling since its debut Sept. 24. It began on Fridays at 8:30 p.m. but was bumped by CBS after three low-rated episodes. The network brought it back last Friday at 9:30 p.m. after the return of “Good Advice” had to be postponed because star Shelley Long was ill. (“Good Advice” resumes full-time production next week and will be rescheduled later this season.)

The producers are happy with the later time period but cannot take advantage of it: The initial eight episodes already have been completed, and they were produced to air at 8:30 p.m., a time when more children are in the audience.

“It’s a shame, because one of the things we wanted to do is say this is a good married couple who love each other, and they have sex, they really do,” Kauffman said.

On “Dream On,” Kauffman, Crane and their executive producer, Kevin Bright, were turned loose by HBO executives. At CBS, they had to go over every script with a network executive. Kauffman refers to those sessions as “laugh riots.” “It really hasn’t been horrendous,” she said. “But it’s the kind of thing where we will sit with a woman assigned to our show, and she will say, ‘There’s too many Gods on that page.’ And we say, ‘What? Huh? What are you talking about?’ ”

Crane recalled one celebrated episode of “Dream On” in which Tupper, played by Brian Benben, found a marijuana joint in his son’s room: “We started by going the network route, where Martin gives the ‘Just say no’ speech to his son. But later, when Martin’s hanging out with his friend, they start talking about old times and smoke the joint. There’s no way you’re going to get away with that on network television.”

At least, not on a new show. “Roseanne” did a similar sort of episode a few weeks ago, but that show’s a major hit. “On network television, when you’re a new producer, you can’t even make a casual reference to drug use,” Kauffman said. “We had a Prozac joke in ‘Family Album’ that they had a hard time with. The line was, ‘Why don’t you take another Prozac and calm down?’ We couldn’t use it.”

In other areas of adjustment, the medium-budget “Dream On” was filmed in cinematic style--with one camera, no audience and no laugh track. The more expensive “Family Album” was shot in sitcom style--with three cameras before a live studio audience.

“What we miss from ‘Dream On’ is having total control over every nuance of the show,” said Bright, who executive produces “Family Album” and is part of a three-year production deal Kauffman and Crane signed with Warner Bros. Television. “You can get every shot to look just the way you want with one camera. You don’t get that complete freedom when you’re shooting in front of an audience, with cameras bumping into each other.”

Shooting before a live studio audience also presented new challenges to the writers.

“There’s much more pressure,” Kauffman said.

“A pressure to get laughs,” Crane added. “When they stop laughing . . .

“You feel like you’ve died,” Kauffman interjected.

“Family Album” was created after CBS approached Kauffman and Crane--who are consultants on the current season of “Dream On” but will have no future involvement--to develop a “white-collar ‘Roseanne.’ ” They also did a pilot for ABC about three couples living in an apartment building. ABC did not order that for series, while CBS did go ahead with “Family Album.”

With all the challenges of moving to network TV, the question arises: Why didn’t the team of Kauffman, Crane and Bright stay in cable?

Mostly because the networks are where the work and the money is.

“Obviously, we have a larger audience on network TV,” Crane said. Even though they were low rated by network standards, the first three episodes of “Family Album” drew an average audience of 6.4 million households, compared to 1.7 million for the average “Dream On.” “There’s also more opportunity to do television shows. HBO has three series on the air. That’s it. And their budgets aren’t anywhere close to network television.”

Kauffman, 37, and Crane, 36, have prepared five more scripts if “Family Album” does well in its new time slot (which it didn’t last week). They are also developing more network TV ideas--but don’t expect “The Cosby Show.”

“The next thing we develop is not going to be about a family in a living room,” Crane said. “It’s going to be a little more adult, for a little later time period, and closer to the sensibility of what we did on ‘Dream On.’ ”