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it is. You take a performer’s character away from him and you’re committing murder. Nobody should be allowed to get away with that. Nobody. I have to know who it is. I got a right to know who it is. You’re the one person who can help me. I’m begging you, Hoagy. I’m down on my knees.”
    And he was, with a thud. Right where he’d drawn that line between us in the sand.
    Only the line in the sand was gone. The waves had erased it. There was only smooth, wet sand there between us now. A corny and obvious symbol, to be sure. But I wasn’t surprised by it. Not in the least. Because it had already happened. I had already entered the world of prime-time television.
    I never thought I’d ever stoop so low as to be a sitcom writer. Not me. No way. But my life had been full of surprises lately, few of them pleasant. Still, my story was cherry pie compared to Lyle Hudnut’s. What had happened to Lyle Hudnut shouldn’t happen to anyone.
    He was an unlikely candidate for stardom, this round-faced pink elephant from Bay Shore, Long Island. It was while he was part of a scruffy Greenwich Village comedy troupe in the midseventies, the Surburbanites, that Lyle Hudnut first stumbled on Chubby Chance, his nasty, dirty, and thoroughly off-the-wall send-up of Mister Rogers. Dressed in a moth-eaten cardigan and sipping from a hot cup of what he claimed was Ovaltine, Chubby advised kids on how to get the family dog stoned, how to steal money from their dad’s trousers, how to get the most fun out of playing doctor with that cute little redhead next door. Chubby Chance on proper nutrition: “What’s the big difference between boogers and broccoli? Kids won’t eat their broccoli.”
    Stardom did, in fact, elude him at first. Lyle Hudnut was still just another fringe performer kicking around the comedy clubs a decade later when he hit upon the idea of Uncle Chubby’s Bedtime Stories, his own hip and caustic version of old childhood favorites. Like “Tom Thumb,” in which poor, tormented little Tom moves to West Hollywood and becomes involved with an older man who is into chains and whips. Like “Henny Penny,” in which Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Duddles, Goosey Poosey and Turkey Lurky do tell the king that the sky is falling, for which he has them slaughtered, dressed, and eaten. Chubby’s bedtime stories caught on with savvy college audiences. Soon Lyle Hudnut was reciting them on David Letterman and campuses around the country. Cult success led to his own HBO special, Uncle Chubby’s Story Hour, and a best-selling book, Uncle Chubby’s Storybook. All of which caught the attention of Godfrey Daniels, enterprising new programming chief of America’s third-place network. Daniels saw Uncle Chubby as a way to pull in both the kids who had outgrown Mister Rogers and their baby-boomer parents as well. He convinced Lyle Hudnut to sand down Chubby’s rougher edges and to move him into the tidy, suburban New Rochelle home of his sister, Deirdre, a prim, no-nonsense lawyer—as well as a divorcée with two little kids and a not-so-gentle rottweiler. It was there that Stanley Chance, an irresponsible, beer-swilling slob who listed his last full-time employment as “high school,” found a home. And a career—as Deirdre’s live-in housekeeper, babysitter, and nemesis—the latter a role he had thoroughly enjoyed since age five.
    The show’s premiere at eight P.M, on Monday, September 24, 1991, was the highest-rated sitcom premiere in the history of network television. Uncle Chubby was an instant phenomenon, a No.1 breakout hit that left Roseanne, The Cosby Show, and Cheers choking on its dust. Over its first season it averaged a 40 share in the Nielsens—as in 40 percent of the televisions in use when it was on. Roseanne, the previous champ in the weekly ratings, had pulled in a mere 33. Uncle Chubby held the No. 1 spot for a record 127 weeks in a row. So potent was it that it shot the rest of the network’s Monday night