And that, CMT executives hope, represents an opportunity for the channel, which started out as a country music version of MTV, to broaden its audience appeal. “The channel’s viewership is extremely flexible,” said Brian Philips, president of CMT, who was onstage to watch the episode being taped. “And they are long over the idea that it needs to be three-and-a-half minute music videos played back to back. We’re in 90 million homes, and most of them are not in rural areas. Every focus group we do with viewers in Charlotte or Columbus, we ask, ‘Should CMT do sitcoms?’ And the answer is: ‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ ”  So it is, starting with “Working Class,” in which Ms. Peterman, already familiar to CMT viewers as host of its highest-rated show, “The Singing Bee,” plays a struggling single mom, trying to raise her three kids in a suburban Chicago neighborhood she can’t really afford. If the show succeeds, CMT hopes to roll out as many as three other sitcoms within the next few months. Next up, most likely, would be a show built around the comedian (and ex-husband of Roseanne) Tom Arnold.  “We’ll ramp up fast,” Mr. Philips said.  It’s not uncommon for networks to diversify their offerings in an attempt to reach a broader audience. Larry Gerbrandt, principal analyst for Media Valuation Partners, said, “If you’ve pushed your genre as far as you can go, and you can’t figure out how to grow the ratings, you’ve got to try something new.”  “The sitcom genre has been largely ignored in the last few years by broadcasters, and the cable networks haven’t gone heavily into it,” he said. “It’s all in the execution, but they’ve picked an area that is not particularly expensive to create and is definitely advertiser friendly.”  Although “Working Class” and the sitcoms to follow are meant to look and feel traditional, the way in which they are developed and produced has been far from it. Brad Johnson, a former comedy executive at Universal and 20th Century Fox, was hired last year as CMT’s senior vice president for comedy development and asked to develop network-quality sitcoms within the constraints of cable budgets.  Which is why there is no studio audience on “Working Class,” why the seven-member writing staff is half the size of that for a network show and, most important, why each episode is produced — from first table read to final shot — in three days. Traditional sitcoms have five-day production schedules, with crew and cast rehearsing all week, blocking out scenes and making changes, then filming in front of an audience, usually on Friday night.  “We don’t think we’re sacrificing comedy or quality at all,” said Mr. Johnson, whose development résumé includes shows like “Major Dad” and “Coach” and who was on the set every day, a hands-on intermediary between the producers — including Jill Cargerman, the show’s creator (also a first-time show runner) — and the network. “But we found some ways to cut corners. And it kept us in L.A. Otherwise we’d have shot this in Atlanta or Canada. Because that’s what we could have afforded.”  In an even more radical cost-cutting move Mr. Johnson did not order full pilots for the CMT sitcom scripts — all domestic comedies — he was considering, including “Working Class.” After reading 350 scripts and deciding on the 4 he liked best, he ordered second scripts of each show and then, instead of pilots, shot what amounted to 15-minute screen tests with prospective casts, using leftover sets from failed pilots that other networks were about to throw out — interchangeable living rooms and kitchens — where actors from all four shows could shoot their scenes.  “Where the networks make a mistake — and believe me, I made it too — is they immediately shoot a pilot and spend $2 million,” said Mr. Johnson, a former executive at Fox and Showtime. “This way we had four 15-minute presentations for considerably less than that, including the development and writing costs.  “We found an NBC pilot set that they were about to tear down, and we used it. We didn’t spend a nickel on construction. Anywhere there were lights, we used them. Networks routinely spend $250,000 on construction for sets that almost always get knocked down and thrown away.”  Ms. Cargerman, who wrote for the network sitcoms “Gary Unmarried” and “Spin City,” said the compressed production schedule fostered “an energizing combination of panic and adrenaline.”  “I’m still a little bit shocked by how productive and proficient we became, and that we were successful in creating episodes that I think look and feel just as satisfying as anything I’ve done on a network before,” she said.  Not that there weren’t downsides. “We felt we were walking on a tightrope a lot of the time because any misstep might have caused everything to fall into chaos,” she said. “And I wondered, since it hadn’t been done before, if we could do it.  “But the longer we went, the more people rose to the challenge, and it became clear there are great advantages to doing it like this. You can fix scenes on the fly in a way you can’t if you’re in front of an audience. But you can’t drop any balls, because there is no time to recover.”  Which kept the pressure on Ms. Peterman, who is in practically every scene, many of them filled with just-added dialogue and physical comedy — falling into mud pits, stumbling around after too much dentist-administered laughing gas. Producers admitted that a less enthusiastic (or more temperamental) star would have ground the production to a halt.  “The schedule was brutal for everyone,” Ms. Peterman admitted. “And I missed having a studio audience, but not as much as I thought I was going to miss it. I got so used to shooting it this way that after a while it felt normal. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.  “But the advantage is we were working in a way that everyone felt invested in the project. You could talk to the writers about the dialogue, and everyone’s opinion mattered. There just wasn’t a lot of red tape. If I had a question, I was able to just call Brian Philips on the phone. What other network president would even give me their real number?”  An article last Sunday about efforts by CMT to bring situation comedies to its prime-time schedule misspelled the surname of the country singer who starred in the TV show “Reba.” She is Reba McEntire, not McIntyre. The article also included outdated information for the network’s premiere of Pauly Shore’s comedy-reality show, “Meet the In-Laws.” After the section had gone to press, CMT announced that it would not start on Jan. 28, as planned. The network did not give a new date.  A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2011, on Page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: Make It Funny, Make It Work, Make It Quickly. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The country music network introduces a sitcom, “Working Class,” to its lineup, with less than the usual production costs.