Greg Evigan Establishes `Family Rules' For Four Teens

The last time he played a TV dad, he had Paul Reiser to lean on.

This time, Greg Evigan is on his own.

The actor returns to series work Tuesday in the new UPN comedy series "Family Rules" at 8:30 p.m. on KSTW-TV, playing a widower struggling to be both father and mother to his four teenage daughters (Maggie Lawson, Shawna Waldron, Andi Eystad and Brooke Garrett). Also the coach of a college basketball team, he often seeks advice from a neighbor (Markus Redmond) in dealing with the varied personalities and needs of his offspring.

"Yeah, I'm raising children again," Evigan laughs in reference to his earlier stint on NBC's "My Two Dads," in which he and Reiser both raised a youngster. "This new character is just jumping into this situation. His wife has died, so he has to take on this incredible responsibility. He tries to run his family like he runs his basketball team, but that doesn't seem to work."

Though "Family Rules" is meant to be funny, Evigan has a sense of obligation to the younger audience it may draw. "On `My Two Dads,' we were always thinking, `Is this the right answer to a problem? Is this really what we want to send out there?' If you have the right scene that puts the message of the story across, it's not too bad."

The executive producers of "Family Rules" make an unusual hybrid. They are Muppet mogul Jim Henson's son Brian, former Fox children's programmer Margaret Loesch, and one veteran of the bawdy "Married . . . With Children" (Russell Marcus). Evigan believes that combination confirms the show's aim to push the boundaries of the traditional family comedy.

"When I got involved, the original script was written in a cutting-edge way," the actor recalls. "As things go along, there is a tendency to become a little homogenized, and I think that will be the fight here. We'll try to keep it edgy enough to be relatable to kids who watch TV today. They're pretty savvy about almost everything, so we have to try to put fresh angles on every story."

"In the beginning," Evigan adds, "you're just trying to find the characters and the relationships. It might seem that I come on a little strong in the pilot, but it didn't feel that we were a family as much as it did after we shot all six shows. You just hope you get the opportunity to keep going and show what you can do."

After finishing the initial episodes of "Family Rules," Evigan went to work on another UPN project. He's in virtually every scene of an action movie called "Survivor," and after a morning spent running through a Toronto sewage-treatment plant, he muses that "It's an appropriate title." Evigan also will appear soon in the family film "Mel," which he describes as " `Free Willy' with a turtle."

Known initially as the heroic trucker of "BJ and the Bear," Evigan returned to TV drama with a brief stay at "Melrose Place." Then, he starred in another Aaron Spelling production when Fox premiered the 1997 serial "Pacific Palisades."

He remembers the latter show's cancellation after half a season as "a surprise. We thought we had something that was going to go for a while, but in a lot of ways, that wasn't really for me.