NBC's “Coupling” is the most talked-about show of the new season, for both good and bad, because there is more at stake with this show than perhaps any other new program on the schedule.

     If it works, it could help NBC keep its Thursday night edge among adults 18-49, which has been slipping. If it doesn't, the network may surrender what has been its trademark night since the days of “Cosby Show” and “Family Ties.”

    But part of the trouble is that the “Coupling” buzz has veered to the negative in recent weeks, with critics and media buyers doubtful that the show's explicitness can keep viewers interested when show isn't all that good.

     "Coupling" may go a long way toward predicting NBC's success this year, and the network very much needs it to catch with viewers.

     The network is debuting only three new comedies this year after failing to introduce a successful one last year, unless you count the barely hanging on “Good Morning Miami,” destined for premature hiatus on Tuesdays.
    Its only returning sitcom from the season before, critically acclaimed “Scrubs,” still hasn’t caught on with a large audience despite its Thursday slot and loses much of its “Friends” leadout.
    With longtime schedule anchors “Friends” and “Frasier” retiring after this season, finding another anchor show to join Thursday’s “Will & Grace” is critical, especially with the new crop of Tuesday comedies looking more and more like brief occupants.
    Enter tonight’s 9:30 p.m. “Coupling," NBC’s most-hyped show when it was introduced at the May upfront. Based on a British sitcom that, as an earlier Media Life story reported, is actually not quite the U.K. phenomenon that NBC would have us believe, “Coupling” is nonetheless close in attitude to “Will & Grace” and similar in presentation to “Friends.”
   "I think [NBC] is very dependent on this show being successful, with ‘Frasier’ ending, which is one of the best comedies on television if you look at all its seasons as a whole, and the doubly whammy of losing ‘Friends,’” says Shari Anne Brill, vice president, director of programming at Carat.  
      " Outside of ‘Will & Grace,’ what, five years ago, they haven’t had a hit new comedy.”
    What NBC is most concerned about, Brill says, is maintaining its adults 18-49 and 18-34 advantage on Thursday, having already ceded households and total viewers to CBS.
    This year that’s an even tougher mandate. Fox may, for once, be competitive at 9 p.m. with “The O.C.,” a summer hit among 18-34s airing Thursdays after the World Series ends (though the network is reportedly mulling over keeping the show in its summer Tuesday slot instead).
     ABC’s “Extreme Makeover,” while not exactly a hit, is more competitive than anything the network has parked there in years and also plays to a younger crowd.
   "Coupling” got the cushiest slot available for a new NBC show, but that also means expectations are quite high. In the same slot last year, “Good Morning, Miami” lost more than 20 percent of its lead-in audience and was shipped to Tuesday. “Coupling” must at least maintain and NBC hopes build on its somewhat fading lead-in.
    And that is where the sex comes in. “Coupling” is so racy that affiliates in South Bend, Ind., and Salt Lake City have banned the show.
   "HBO has nurtured the success of ‘Sex and the City,’ an all-American concept that is very similar. The difference is that since HBO is unrestricted by network clearances and advertiser morality, cutting edge [for NBC] has to be more than flashes of nudity, profanity and sex in the bathroom stall,” says A.J. Livsey, senior media planner at Richmond’s Martin Agency and Media Life TV critic.
    "Shocking does not equal intriguing. NBC has apparently yet to learn this subtlety.”
     Buzz has been fading ever since media buyers actually got a look at the show. Racy summer promos, while attracting a good deal of attention among the media community, may not be enough to attract viewers.
    Still, “Coupling” plays on a formula that worked well enough for “Friends” nine years ago, simply with more sexual innuendo.
   If this show doesn’t work, NBC will retool fast. As this week’s premiere ratings proved, ABC’s “According to Jim” is already finishing ahead of “Frasier” among 18-49s. NBC doesn’t want to surrender another time slot.
    "The importance of having that success on Thursday nights, it’s vital, NBC can’t lose that,” Brill says. “They’re going to hold on to it any way they can.”