'NEWSRADIO' THE NEXT BIG THING?\Popularity growing for comedy that already earns high marks for\savvy look at office culture.

Byline: PHIL ROSENTHAL 

An hour before filming, the scene in which everyone was supposed to be a little drunk still wasn't quite right. It just didn't click.

So, even as their studio audience was being led into the soundstage at Hollywood's Sunset Gower Studios, the writers and cast of NBC's "NewsRadio" huddled backstage and tossed lines at each other.

"We rewrote the entire scene. It was unbelievable," said Stephen Root, who plays the enigmatic and idiosyncratic station owner, Jimmy James.

And, in the end, it was also brilliant.

Such is the charm of "NewsRadio," a hit just waiting to happen. The sophisticated NBC comedy, a midseason replacement a year ago, is 39th among all prime-time shows so far this season. But it is ranked in the top 25 with those advertiser-coveted age 18-to-49 viewers.

More significantly, the fans its savvy sensibilities have won at 8:30 p.m. Sundays seem to be dedicated, the way "Seinfeld" and "Cheers" viewers were in the years before those series became huge successes.

"It's like everybody's favorite secret show at the moment," Root said. "It's not a knock-over, giant, smash hit. But everybody respects it because it's character-driven comedy. It's not that 'set-up, joke, set-up, joke' crap."

If the qualitative knock on "Friends" is that it's not realistic enough - all those beautiful people, all that square-footage in a Manhattan apartment, all that coffee - one of the great strengths of "NewsRadio" is that it nearly always rings true. Often absurd, but true.

Although it's set in a radio station, WNYX, "NewsRadio" neatly captures the quirks of any tight-knit office. There's the manipulative egomaniac, the eccentric boss, the sycophant, the all-knowing secretary and so on.

Its stories are ordinary: Christmas bonuses, gossip, sloppy desks, office romance and who's going to get that big promotion. And yet it always finds their inherent humor.

"It's that incestuous lifestyle you get into when you're in a place where everybody works too many hours," said Dave Foley, formerly of Canada's Kids in the Hall comedy troupe, who plays WNYX news director Dave Nelson, the glue that holds the place together.

"Anyone who has had a job where you spend just way, way, way too much time with the people you work with and away from your family, (and knows) how screwed up you get, understands what this show is about."

Pulling that off is a cast that is quietly becoming one of television's top comedy ensembles. Everyone on the show - from Andy Dick's whiny reporter and Vicki Lewis' gossiping secretary to Khandi Alexander's aloof anchorwoman - eventually gets his or her turn in the spotlight.

"Each of the eight characters on this show has an ability to make you care about them," said Lewis, whose character lives on the office snacks because she doesn't have money for lunch. "Each person has a lot of heart. There are a lot of facets to every character. They're not just cardboard sitcom characters."

As "Saturday Night Live" alumnus Phil Hartman, who plays the legend-in-his-own-mind news reader Bill McNeal, sees it, "Anybody is capable of getting a gut-wrenching laugh out of the audience."

But not every line has to be a joke. It only has to advance the story, which would seem obvious enough but is, nonetheless, extraordinary among network comedies.

For that, the credit belongs to creator and executive producer Paul Simms, whose last series was HBO's acclaimed "The Larry Sanders Show," which does a masterful job of combining comedy and drama in a similar setting and is produced under similar conditions.

"Paul Simms has really dedicated himself to gathering up these rebel, freak writers," said Joe Rogan, a standup comedian who plays "NewsRadio's" low-key but bizarre engineer. "It's a tight band of psychopaths."

They may be "psychopaths," but they have the confidence to allow their actors - many of whom, such as Hartman and Foley, have strong improvisational backgrounds - to take a stab at improving whatever they've written.

"Too many shows, a writer sits down and creates characters and then bangs his head against the wall trying to make the actors do exactly what he wants," Simms said. "With this show, I cast people who I thought were funny, who made me laugh, and have given them a tremendous amount of leeway to do what they want."

Dick simply marvels at the fact "they listen to what I'm saying."

One reason they do is that Simms purposely sought out writers who hadn't much previous sitcom experience. Their backgrounds were eclectic, like his, with stints in late-night TV sketch comedy and on the Harvard Lampoon.

"We're very loose," said executive story editor Josh Lieb, 23.

Rogan's engineer character was barely fleshed out when the show was about to launch. But he and the writers worked together to make him both unique and whole. Now, as with the other characters on the show, they intuitively know what he will say or do.

Root worked with James Burrows, the former "Cheers" executive producer and director who directed the first few episodes of "NewsRadio," to make Jimmy who he is today.

"It was a straight boss on paper," Root said. "I bent it a little bit at the first audition. Burrows bent it a little more. And by the time we got to the network, it was Jimmy. We just kept bending it until it was interesting. We didn't want to do another Mr. Carlson (the boss on 'WKRP in Cincinnati'), you know?"

While "NewsRadio" hasn't caught fire yet, NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield does feel confident enough about its following to move it out of its cushy Tuesday time slot after "Wings" and before "Frasier" - now occupied by "3rd Rock From the Sun" - and into the most hotly contested hour in prime time, Sunday nights between 8 and 9.

"That's the ultimate compliment, putting them in the toughest time period in network television and feeling they'll succeed," Littlefield said. "They're just poised for ... BOOM. They've hit their stride. They're doing wonderful things."

And if the network's gamble of pitting "Dateline NBC" directly against CBS'

"60 Minutes" at 7 p.m., beginning March 17, pays off and helps draw viewers to "NewsRadio" and its 8 p.m. NBC lead-in, "Mad About You," the quality of the writing and the acting just might make a blockbuster out of "NewsRadio" yet.

"It seems to be catching on in a healthy way - it's not faddish," Lewis said.

"It's not exactly an overnight thing like 'Friends,' " said co-producer Joe Furey, who, along with Simms, used to write for David Letterman.

"Would you really want to be No. 1 and have people prying into your life?" said Maura Tierney, who plays Nelson's love interest and top lieutenant. "It would make me uncomfortable."

But discomfort may be inevitable. Since its move to Sundays in January, "NewsRadio" - which, oddly enough, is produced by rival ABC and Brillstein-Grey Productions - has improved NBC's performance in its time slot by 14 percent in total households and is showing no signs of having peaked.

"It's a slow snowball," Rogan said. "Rather than something that's force-fed on the public with a big publicity blitz - 'LOOK HOW GREAT IT IS!' - the public is going, 'This is pretty cool.' "!

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Photo (1--Cover--Color) STAY TUNED TV's 'NewsRadio' is poised on the edge of success - and just waiting its turn (2) Phil Hartman, left, and Andy Dick laugh it up during a break from taping "NewsRadio," an ensemble-driven comedy about a tight-knit radio station office that is showing some ratings growth for NBC. (3) Creator and executive producer Paul Simms, center, on the set of "NewsRadio," used to work on "The Larry Sanders Show." Tina Gerson/Daily News