Sometimes a show can have every possible advantage and it still doesn't work. "Leap of Faith" is an example of that.
This sitcom was created by Jenny Bicks. She was a writer for "Sex and the City." That's kind of important and you'll understand why in a moment.
This show also landed the best possible half hour on the TV schedule, when it debuted: Thursday Night at 8:30pm ET. That was the time slot that immediately followed the highest rated show on television at that time: "Friends." The lineup of "Must See TV," as the Peacock billed it at the time, was unstoppable. Well...
This show was about Sarah Paulson's character, who decided to ditch her engagement (for no clear reason other than she wanted to see what would happen if she did) all for what life still had in store for her as she moved back into the dating scene with her pals. The name of the character is Faith, so you see the double meaning of the title.
The point of the show was to present an "SATC" environment but more "family friendly" for prime time broadcast network scheduling. Yet, they were still covering the same ground as that TV-MA series, with a whole lot of talk about sex (since they couldn't be seen having any on the National Broadcasting Company)!
Despite the "leap" being taken here, Faith seems oddly unsure of herself, questioning every decision and doubting her own best efforts. I guess the TV trope being played on here is the intellectual woman with the low emotional IQ. This was, at the time, being handled a whole lot better on Fox's "Ally McBeal" but as an additional flavor, it was just another thing to try and hook an audience for this program. Isn't that a cute character trait? Keep watching!
New York played a part because it's "The City" and everybody is on the lookout, on the make and ready to hook up. Unlike "Friends," there was a realistically diverse cast being represented here, though nobody played a stereotyped character. But everybody did talk in one-liners and standard sitcom jokey dialogue, which was a bit of a miss from the dialog on the HBO series this was trying to mimic. How did Ms. Bicks not give her characters something a bit more clever to talk about?
Really good cast, what with Lisa Edelstein, who likely would have missed "House, MD" if this had succeeded, Regina King, who was beginning to branch out into voiceover work, Tim Meadows, long time SNL player doing his occasional appearances in sitcoms at the time, and of course Ms. Paulson, who always does the best she can with the material she gets. Her next stop would be an even higher profile show: the all-star cast of Aaron Sorkin's return to episodic television after "The West Wing," "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which I thankfully don't have to discuss for this list.
Some people enjoyed the toned down level of material presented here, while others thought it was trite, dull and derivative. The show actually got decent ratings, but "decent" is far from what was expected on NBC's biggest night of the week.
