Television

WATCHING ELLIE NBC, Tuesdays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.; LEAP OF FAITH NBC, Thursdays, 8:30 p.m. E.T. The networks have long resented HBO, with its nyah-nyah-ing slogan, “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” But these network sitcoms are aiming to climb on the HBO buzz wagon. Ellie has a pay-cable veneer–an edgy narrative style (each story unfolds in real time), a cinematic look and no laugh track–but the safe heart of a network show. As a lounge singer of a certain age sleeping with her band’s married guitarist, Seinfeld alumna Julia Louis-Dreyfus, above, has a bittersweet charm (and, yes, she can sing), but it’s lost amid wacky-neighbor jokes and slapstick. Faith, from Sex and the City scribe Jenny Bicks, wears its cable pedigree too obviously. Faith (Sarah Paulson, in red) dumps her fiance–a man so clearly wrong for her she must have fallen for him under hypnosis–and rejoins single life with the support of three pals: the slutty one, the kinda slutty one and the sensible one. Sound familiar? The banter is zingy and saucy, but every scene–the dishy cocktail klatches, the send-ups of Upper East Side society, a disastrous wedding shower–recalls something done funnier and more honestly on Sex. Oh, it beats Inside Schwartz. But it’s not HBO. It’s TV.

–By James Poniewozik