Asleek, black, chauffeured town car glides up to the immense, glittering facade of Hollywood's Kodak Theatre, the new home of the Academy Awards.

Mike O'Malley '88, star of the hit sitcom, "Yes, Dear," emerges and is ushered toward a carpeted entryway cordoned off with black velvet ropes. He flashes a smile for the cadre of photographers. Fans shout out his name, and O'Malley signs a few autographs before ducking into the building.

Tonight's CBS party, a mixer for critics and network stars, is underground in the vast Kodak complex, in the fabulously hip Lucky Strike bowling alley. The room swirls with odd couples as self-assured actors court bookish television critics. Ted Danson talks to a Midwestern newspaperwoman with horn-rimmed glasses about his show, "Becker." A radio host corners Charlie Sheen, who headlines the new series "Two and a Half Men." Bite-sized strawberry parfaits are served in crystal aperitif glasses, and guests sip trendy Cosmopolitan cocktails and mineral water. The critics indulge while the stars--especially the waifish starlets--largely ignore the bacchanalian spread. Every mouth is in motion, rapid-fire, amidst the din of techno-pop and crashing bowling pins.

O'Malley's ever-present baseball cap bobs above the commotion. He chats up Robert Bianco of USA Today. Tonight he is working, grabbing elbows, making eye contact, cracking jokes. If you know him, you can tell this is the part of his job he could do without. He's more comfortable talking baseball with the limo driver than pleasing the paparazzi. But he knows how to play the game and he's a pro: it took 15 years of playing it well to get where he is today, a co-star in the cornerstone show of CBS's top-ranked Monday night lineup. In addition to his success as a television actor, O'Malley has hosted game shows and has written and produced several plays. He has appeared in movies with Billy Bob Thornton, John Cusack and Sandra Bullock. He spent last week in Chicago golfing in Bill Murray's annual tournament. He owns a beautiful home in Hollywood, and best of all, he and his wife, Lisa, are the proud parents of 9-month-old Fiona. Life, as they say, is good.

Life was not nearly this good four years ago. In the fall of 1999, "The Mike O'Malley Show," which O'Malley wrote and headlined, was dumped by NBC after just two episodes. The critics were harsh ("a comedy vacuum," wrote one) and the vilification hit especially close to home since the material came from O'Malley's own life: after his best friend gets married, a 30-year-old bachelor (O'Malley) decides to grow up. At the time, O'Malley wasn't sure he'd ever act again, but he took the setback without whining and learned from the experience.

"It was a pretty big flop. But you're foolish if you think it won't happen to you," he says. "It happens to 40 shows a year. Cancellation is part of the business, and you have to roll with it." And, he adds, "I was an unknown guy who got paid a million dollars to do that show. It would be crass to complain about it."

O'Malley says he realized early on that to be successful in Hollywood, you have to have several options going at all times. Soon after "The Mike O'Malley Show" bombed, he struck a deal to write a one-hour drama with 20th Century Fox, prepared for the premier of "28 Days," in which he appeared with Sandra Bullock, and began talks with Broadway producers interested in developing his latest play. Six months after his show failed, he got the call for "Yes, Dear," and O'Malley was firmly back in the saddle.

From the outset, "Yes, Dear" was a dark horse. Critics called it "serviceable" and predicted it wouldn't last the season. But the series was a hit with viewers, so much so that this fall the network moved it to Monday at 8 p.m., a time slot that is reserved for tried-and-true programs.

In "Yes, Dear," O'Malley plays Jimmy Hughes, who with his on-screen wife, Christine (played by Liza Snyder), lives in the carriage house next door to sister Kim (Jean Louisa Kelly) and brother-in-law Greg Warner (Anthony Clark). The humor revolves around the two couples' divergent attitudes toward marriage, child rearing and life in general. Jimmy and Christine are working class, laid back and a little crude; Greg and Kim are neurotic perfectionists.

O'Malley thinks people watch the show because they can relate to it. "I had friends who didn't watch 'Yes, Dear' at first," he says. "Now they have kids and they get it. You're 35 and you've got to teach a kid how to go to the bathroom. The last time you did this was 32 years ago. Now you're teaching him when and where, waving goodbye to it in the toilet and calling grandma to tell her the good news."

As a new dad, O'Malley "gets it" all right, including 2 a.m. feedings and sleep deprivation. Forget fame and fortune. Give the man 40 winks. "Sleep is the most powerful currency to me right now," he says, stretching his long denim-clad legs in the back seat of the town car on the way home from the party. "Even when Fiona is quiet, Lisa and I can't sleep because we're alert in case she does cry," he says.

A year or so ago, in anticipation of Fiona, the O'Malleys moved out of their Venice Beach bungalow into a large house in a quieter, more kid-friendly Hollywood neighborhood. Lisa, blonde and lithe with an easy smile, is a child psychologist. She and O'Malley met at a Super Bowl party thrown by O'Malley's longtime friend, Craig Heisner '88, eight years ago. A basketball hoop hangs above their garage door, and in the backyard, a towering palm tree cloaked in vines shades a pool and fountain trimmed in Mexican tile. Ashes from O'Malley's cigars smudge a teak picnic tabletop.

Inside, the spacious living room is empty save for baby toys and a stone fireplace at one end. They're too busy right now to furniture shop, explains O'Malley. They live two doors down from the house made famous by the long-running sitcom "Happy Days," and they are reminded of this fact daily when a tour bus rolls down the street, its megaphone-wielding guide narrating the neighborhood. From the corner grocery store, if the smog isn't too thick, the O'Malleys have a perfect view of the white letters spelling out "Hollywood" across the hills that rise at the city's edge.

Sitcoms are the closest thing Hollywood offers to a regular job, and they're hard work. From mid-August through late March, the "Yes, Dear" crew shoots 24 weekly episodes. Each Thursday, the cast reads through the new script and begins blocking out the action. On Friday, they're handed a revised script and they rehearse all day. Over the weekend, the writers revise some more. Monday, it's a run-through for network executives, who critique performance and writing. On Tuesday, another script revision emerges. The actors rehearse on the set with cameramen, dolly grips and focus pullers. Often they'll pre-shoot the segments with the kids in case the young actors forget their lines before the live audience. On Wednesday, the cast and crew do a run-through "off book," without the script. In the evening, they shoot the episode in front of a live studio audience from about 5 to 10 p.m. On the way out the door, the actors are handed the script for the next show. The cycle starts again the next morning.

Although O'Malley plays Jimmy for weeks on end, and in real life seems much like him (a T-shirt-, jeans- and baseball cap-wearing regular guy), they are not kindred spirits. "I wouldn't hang out with Jimmy, but I could talk to him at a barbecue," says O'Malley. Co-star Snyder says O'Malley is nothing like Jimmy. "He's hard-working, for one thing," she says. He's also a nice guy, she adds, a stroke of luck from her point of view since the script calls for them to kiss now and then.

In fact, O'Malley often plays characters with whom he has little in common, including randy would-be suitor Oliver in "28 Days," bet-taking air traffic controller Pete in "Pushing Tin" and over-the-top Boston sports fan "The Rick" in a series of ESPN commercials.

"I always play doofus guys because I have a rubbery face, one that's easy to make stupid expressions with," explains O'Malley. But, he adds, "I think of myself more as a writer. It's where my head is. To be honest, I don't get a thrill out of acting anymore. I'm seriously thinking about retiring after the show runs its course."

O'Malley has written three plays, "Three Years from Thirty," "Diverting Devotion," and his latest, "Searching for Certainty." "I started writing plays because I watched other people get parts that I wanted. I figured the best way to get those parts was to write them myself," he says.

John Edwards, UNH professor emeritus of theater, says he is not surprised that O'Malley succeeds as the "clever and jovial bad boy in the television series, and has published short plays and now has a major full-length play in the works." At UNH, O'Malley was most proud of his two roles in serious plays, Edwards remembers, but at the same time in musicals he was "just wonderful" and an "effortless performer."

O'Malley was raised in Nashua, N.H., by a family of extroverts. Of the four O'Malley children, two are in show business. His younger sister, Kerry, is an award-winning Broadway actress who stars in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House through December.

"We weren't the Von Trapps or anything, but my uncles and my parents had great senses of humor," says O'Malley. An aunt, Regina O'Malley, is a professional actress, "so we had a role model of someone actually making a living as a performer," explains Kerry O'Malley. She adds, "In the Irish tradition of storytelling, one had to hold one's own at the dinner table if one wanted to be heard." Their parents instilled in them a belief that what they had to say was interesting, and that they should speak their minds, she says.

O'Malley didn't have serious theatrical aspirations until his senior year at UNH. "I don't think anyone loved college more than me," he recalls. "I was hyper-aware that it was a unique time. I was always a five-minute walk from 25 of my closest friends. I squeezed a lot out of it," he says.

Between parties at his fraternity, Kappa Sigma, and Freshman Camp reunions, Mike eventually discovered the UNH theater department. Theater professor Carol Lucha Burns remembers him as a standout at his first audition. "His song was hilarious--'I'm a Little Teapot' or something like that. But his cold reading landed him the part of a steel worker," she says. His enthusiasm and natural talent won him coveted roles, including Danny Zuko in the 1988 production of "Grease" his senior year. "I started out as an actor who was a goof-off--I was not considered for more serious roles until professor Gil Davenport gave me a break," O'Malley recalls. Taking a chance, he auditioned for the role of Mephistopheles in "Dr. Faustus."

Edwards says that Davenport, who died earlier this year, had to pick between O'Malley and a student who looked the part. Davenport said he chose O'Malley "'because he will really act to get into this part,' recalls Edwards. "And, of course, Mike nearly stole the show."

"I remember seeing Mike in 'Little Shop of Horrors' in Portsmouth before we graduated," says Rick Munroe '88. "What stood out then, and what makes him a great actor now, is his extraordinary sense of comic timing. You knew then he was going to be something special."

After graduation, O'Malley joined Munroe and a few other friends in New York City. There Munroe and O'Malley studied at a now-defunct acting school for two years.

Just months out of acting school, O'Malley was hired to host a Nickelodeon game show, "Get the Picture." The job gave him the financial security to pursue other acting opportunities. "And I made great contacts," says O'Malley. "Two Nick guys helped me produce 'Three Years from Thirty.'"

Acting offers flowed in. At Nickelodeon, he hosted another show, "Guts," for four seasons. ESPN hired him as The Rick, and he starred in 20 episodes of a Warner Brothers sitcom called "Life with Roger." Moving to Los Angeles, he landed roles in several films, including "Deep Impact" and "Above Freezing." But at the same time--despite the washout of "The Mike O'Malley Show"--O'Malley was beginning to identify himself as a writer more than an actor.

O'Malley's latest play once again draws on his personal experience. "Searching for Certainty" is about Pre-Cana, the marriage preparation workshop that couples must attend, as Mike and Lisa O'Malley did, before marrying in the Catholic Church. The play presents theatergoers with such questions as: What is fidelity? What is trust? How do you create faith if you've lost it? How do you deal with change in a relationship?

"It occurred to me that people who get married in their 30s, like me, have already been 'divorced' from a significant person, if not in the literal sense," he says. "So what makes things different now, with this person you're going to marry? That's what 'Searching' is about." There is studio interest in a film version of the play, and last summer the Williamstown (Mass.) Theatre Festival featured it in a series of new play readings. It got a standing ovation.

"For friends who know me, my serious plays are not a departure," says O'Malley. "But for people who know me through my television characters, it's unexpected. The goofy side has been my living, but it's my introspective side that comes out in the writing."

Despite his goal to devote himself to writing, O'Malley will play Jimmy Hughes for at least a few more seasons. In the meantime, there's a daughter to dote on, sports teams to follow and new plays to write. Maybe his next work will have to do with fatherhood and sleep deprivation. Or maybe not. With Mike O'Malley, it's a good idea to expect the unexpected. ~