Served up weekly, this show could be a big fat Greek flop

Some movies should remain movies. For example, here’s a prediction for 2003: Nothing short of liposuction will make a CBS version of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding� -- retitled “My Big Fat Greek Life� for TV -- palatable as a weekly comedy.

If you’re thinking this is about Plato, Aristotle, the Acropolis, Athenian art or other Hellenic antiquities, you’re living on another planet. Nor is there anything remotely Socratic about its dialogue. In fact, you can bet that “My Big Fat Greek Life� will go against one of the cherished concepts inscribed on the great shrine of Delphi: “Nothing in Excess.�

Scheduled to begin shooting in January, the series is spun from a movie based on a one-woman stage show by comic Nia Vardalos. She walks her story’s ethnic high wire as 30ish Toula Portokalos, whose romance with high school teacher Ian Miller (John Corbett) frees her from dowdiness and a drab life but not the smothering attentions of her Grecophile father, Gus (Michael Constantine), and the rest of her family. They’re all over Toula about ending her unmarried status, pressuring her not to mate with just anyone but to wed a Greek boy, have Greek babies and feed the multitudes.

Fat chance. The movie ends right after Toula and non-Greek Ian marry and set up housekeeping under Gus’ close monitoring, which is where the TV series is said to begin, with Corbett the only major big-screen cast member who isn’t returning.

Because of the intrusive in-laws factor, there’s been talk about Everyone Loves Toula being a ringer for CBS’ smart and witty “Everyone Loves Raymond.� That, too, is fanciful thinking.

Look, I’ve nothing against the film, which has become this year’s surprise box office behemoth, a lucrative romantic comedy for the ages and the most famous movie about Greeks since “Never on Sunday,� which also earned a ton of money after being made in 1960 for a pittance.

In fact, I found “My Big Fat Greek Wedding� very funny, was charmed by Vardalos, and related some of the cultural mandates imposed on Toula to my own Jewish background (“What -- you can’t find a Jewish girl?�).

Plus, I gave thumbs down to negative reviews that sniffed about director Joel Zwick’s background in TV sitcoms, as if his entry into cinema’s great, glistening Parthenon had ruined the neighborhood. Now, that’s funny.

Many good feature directors first worked in television, so what’s the problem? Besides, a dazzling sitcom is as much high art as a top theatrical movie. NBC’s “Seinfeld,� HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show� and a few other masterworks, for example, are TV comedy’s very own Mona Lisa and Sistine Chapel rolled into one, to be roped off and admired.

This is apples and oranges, of course, but on their own terms, Citizens Seinfeld and Sanders stand as tall as “Citizen Kane.� And are arguably even more impressive, given the challenge of successful TV series to sustain their appeal over extended periods instead of just two hours.

Yet don’t expect “My Big Fat Greek Life� to join that elite crowd. Or come even close.

Even though the original pilot was made before the movie was released, the series is bucking tradition. That’s because TV series rarely translate well as movies, and movies just as rarely succeed creatively as series. One striking exception was “MASH,� which quieted skeptics by soaring on TV for more than a decade, thanks largely to Larry Gelbart, Gene Reynolds and Burt Metcalfe, while only partially imitating Robert Altman’s terrific movie.

As for the coming Vardalos series, its good cast (which also includes Lainie Kazan, Andrea Martin and Joey Fatone) won’t prevent it from buckling creatively under the same tonnage of burlesque and broad nonsense that made the movie such a hoot.

Hyperbole works wonders for comedy in limited increments, and there was nothing subtle about Melina Mercouri’s “Never on Sunday� hooker with a heart. But week after week after week, throughout an initial order for seven episodes? They don’t call it over the top for nothing, and a special brand of genius (think what Larry David gave “Seinfeld�) is required to find freshness in weekly extravagance.

Vardalos has said: “I basically took every Greek wedding I’ve ever been to, including mine, and on a scale of one to 10, turned it up to 11.�

Indeed, her characters are stereotypes if not flat-out caricatures, the fattest of these being Gus, who insists in the movie that all words have Greek roots and believes that a spritz of Windex cures everything short of terminal illness.

Although initially funny, these gags begin to age well before the final credits roll. As do Ian’s effete, brainless, super-WASP parents, who are not just over the top, but over the moon. Imagine this coming to you on a weekly basis.

“Muriel’s Wedding� it’s not. Observed from afar, in fact, the CBS adaptation of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding� seems much like prime time’s look-alike sitcom mediocrities, and it will take something truly inspired from Vardalos and her writers to lift it above that teeming herd.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at [email protected].