NEW YORK --
The critics sure didn't baby Baby Bob.On first encountering CBS' sitcom about a talking 6-month-old, they were hard pressed to find a good thing to say. Any good thing.
But that didn't matter, since viewers wasted no time adopting the show.
Once they got past being a little creeped out by Bob's ability to speak and his oddly adult face, they were charmed by Baby Bob and its tiny leading man.
No one is more surprised than its initially reluctant, um, father, Michael Saltzman, who produced such shows as Wings, Anything But Love and Murphy Brown.
Last fall he was invited to develop a comedy about an infant with the gift of gab. "My first reaction was: 'I'll take a meeting, but no way am I going to do a talking baby.' "
On the other hand, Saltzman didn't want to be immature about it, especially when he found out Baby Bob, based on the wisecracking infant who starred in some defunct dot-com's commercials, had a guaranteed six-episode run. (The final show of the run ends tonight at 8:30 p.m., with a good shot at a pickup for fall).
So Saltzman's next response was to ask himself, "How do I make this a show that I would watch?"
Saltzman wanted something more than a variation on Mr. Ed or My Mother the Car.
Bob the Baby, he decided, would be a show "not about a talking baby, but about a family that has to deal with this prodigy. And no 'poopie diaper' jokes!"
Now the baby could be a real baby, one excited by seeing a dog, touching balloons, discovering his own ears -- then reporting each experience in fine detail.
"He has the world view of a baby, the vocabulary of an adult, and the emotional level of a 3-to-6-year-old," says Saltzman, who, as the father of girls age three and six, is well acquainted with a child's prismatic nature.
"With children," he marvels, "there's one moment you look at them and they're like a teenager. Then the next moment they're like a baby. But that contradiction is something to embrace, not run away from."
Like anyone, the contradiction-enriched Bob has his shortcomings. When on one episode he attended a "Mommy and Me" class, he found that, unlike all the other babies in the class, he had no idea how to clap his hands.
"I tried," he whispered to his mom. "I can't." Not that he cared -- at least, not until he sensed Mom's disappointment. Mom is played by Joely Fisher, part of a supporting cast that also includes Adam Arkin as his dad; Holland Taylor as his divorced maternal grandmother; Elliott Gould as his widowed paternal grandfather; and Marissa Tait as the free-and-easy baby sitter who became Bob's first confidante. Grown-up actor Ken Campbell furnishes Bob's little-guy voice.
Filmed with multiple cameras without an audience, "it's a hard show to produce," says Saltzman, an executive producer who had never worked with either babies or special effects, and had to figure out where the baby would end and the special effects start.
Just how artificially enhanced is Bob, anyway?
"More than I would have thought but less than you might think," Saltzman says, rather cryptically.
The baby (or rather, twin girls in a tag-team arrangement) is quite real, he explains. Apart from the computer-applied mouth to match the dubbed-in voice, Bob's sweetly deadpan expression is real, too.
As for the rest of Bob's on-camera performance, it's not the product of computer animation, but instead patience and deft editing.
Plus flashes of dumb luck. Saltzman recalls a scene where Bob's grandmother misunderstood his mother and erupted, "He can FLY!?" Then the camera panned to Bob for a reaction and -- who knows why? -- he began to flap his little arms.
Oh, baby!
Though Baby Bob may seem dependent on a very perishable premise, Saltzman says he has several years' worth of story ideas.
And, never fear, the show won't wax into a Toddler Bob or Kindergarten Bob, he vows. "Bob will age about a month for every season," played by a succession of Baby Bob look-alikes, since "any given baby is good for a half-season at the outside."
"But as a casual viewer, you won't notice the different babies," says Saltzman, pledging Bob will always be Bob. "It's not going to be like when they switched Darrins on Bewitched."
