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