LOS ANGELES -- It's been a banner year for Pittsburgh in prime time: Spike TV's "The Kill Point" was filmed and set here, TNT's now-canceled "Heartland" focused on a Pittsburgh transplant surgeon, and now Fox's "Back to You" (8 p.m. Wednesday) revels in the idiosyncrasies of a pair of Pittsburgh news anchors.

Why Pittsburgh for this one? Creators Steve Levitan ("Just Shoot Me") and Christopher Lloyd ("Frasier") disagreed on where to set the series, with Lloyd preferring Buffalo, N.Y., and Levitan opting for Pittsburgh, where his college buddy, KDKA's Ken Rice, works. The pair threw the decision to Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori, who picked Pittsburgh because it figures prominently in a joke he likes to share with colleagues (sorry, it's too off-color to publish in a family newspaper, but rest assured, it doesn't demean our city).

Pittsburghers may most appreciate the location, but for the show's creators the setting was an afterthought. The ace in their pocket was Kelsey Grammer ("Frasier," "Cheers"). They created "Back to You" with him in mind for the lead role of Chuck Darling.

"Back to You" begins with a flashback to Darling's last night on the air at WURG in Pittsburgh in 2006 before he moves on to larger markets, eventually arriving in Los Angeles, the No. 2 TV market in the country. But a profanity-filled, accidental on-air tirade sends him falling back to Pittsburgh, currently market No. 22.

Lloyd said the goal was to create a character for Grammer who was not the same as Frasier, "but not so far away that people would say, 'Well, what? He's a sheriff in Alaska?' It had to be close enough to him so people could accept him, but also utilize some of his great strengths. He plays big attitudes well, and pomposity."

Grammer said his "Back to You" character, Chuck Darling, may share some similarities with Frasier Crane, but they're not identical.

"Although Frasier was equally self-obsessed, he was trying to do the world some good," Grammer said in July. "This fellow is trying to do himself some good, and I think what makes him funny is that he has a kind of arrogance and a comfort in his own ego."

With Grammer on board, producers went looking for an actress to play Chuck's co-anchor, Kelly Carr, and found another sitcom veteran, Patricia Heaton ("Everybody Loves Raymond").

"We're gonna put Pittsburgh on the map," Heaton said at a Fox party in July, before correcting herself. "That sounds arrogant; Pittsburgh is already on the map."

Heaton studied journalism at Ohio State University and comes from a long line of journalists. Her father was sports editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and her brother currently writes for that newspaper. Heaton interned at a Cleveland TV station one summer while in college, editing news film.

"There were affairs going on and people vying for power," she recalled. Heaton also remembered watching the anchors carefully and seeing their tics, like a tilt of the head when finishing a sentence or to emphasize a point. "That's so exciting to me to have something concrete to hang your performance on, these little physical bits.

"I love the hairdos and seeing the different markets," she said. "You've got your local New York anchors, the gals who really could use a little wax on the brow. Then you get all the way to the West Coast, where some of them look like hookers."

Directed by the king of TV sitcoms, James Burrows ("Friends"), and featuring Fred Willard ("Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy") as a goofy sports anchor, "Back to You" accurately captures many TV news conventions, although they're not always particular to Pittsburgh.

The station has an R-rolling Latina weathercaster, Montana Diaz Herrera (Ayda Field), and though Pittsburgh stations have had their share of attractive women offering weather forecasts, they're more often white and definitely don't dress as provocatively as Montana does.

The show does tap into Pittsburgh's ethnic roots by naming a reporter Gary Crezyzewski (Ty Burrell, "Out of Practice"), who reports from in front of the Allegheny County Courthouse. At night. During a downpour. (Score! Direct hit to local news!)

The photo of Downtown Pittsburgh used as a backdrop behind the WURG anchor desk was taken by North Side freelance photographer Roy Engelbrecht, who also supplied WQED's "On Q" with a cityscape photo for its set.

The Fox sitcom's title also came from a Pittsburgher. After flirting with the name "Action News," KDKA's Rice passed along "Back to You" as a title suggestion from former KDKA managing editor Stu Samuels. (While "Back to You" was in development, Rice offered some ideas to Levitan, who once worked in TV news, but Rice said none of his specific suggestions made it into the show).

Although filmed on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, the sitcom benefits from the memories of several former Pittsburghers on its staff, including production designer Bernard Vyzga ("Stacked," "The Nanny"), who studied theater design as an undergrad and graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1970s; writer Abraham Higginbotham ("Arrested Development," "Will & Grace"), who grew up in Washington, Pa., and graduated from Trinity High School in 1988; and actor Josh Gad, a 2003 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, who plays WURG's young news director, Ryan Church.

Vyzga said Rice shot a video tour inside KDKA that helped him design the WURG newsroom. It replicates a noticeable element from KDKA's newsroom: the names of Western Pennsylvania towns that snake across the walls. A July set visit revealed one town name was misspelled for the pilot (Waynesburg became Wainesburg), but it's not visible and has since been fixed. ("I should know better because I went to CMU!" Vyzga said.)

Higginbotham, who joined the show after the pilot, said he helps supply the writers with names of towns for use in "Back to You" scripts, but if they make a mistake, "No one is allowed to yell at me!" he said. "If I screw up, forgive me, I'm doing my best."

Perhaps in future episodes Higginbotham will prevent references to "freeways," a California term heard in the pilot, and this news tease, which is unlikely to ever come to pass in Pittsburgh: "Good news, homeowners: Your property taxes may be going down!" Maybe it was meant to be satire?

One story that's in an upcoming script, bearing in mind that scripts often change before episodes are completed, has the weathercaster refusing to do a story about flooding along the Monongahela because she can't pronounce the name of the river.

Pittsburghers sometimes complain that shows set here, like "The Kill Point," never feature characters with a Pittsburgh accent. "Back to You" can get away with it more easily because real Pittsburgh newscasters don't have the Yinzer accent, but Higginbotham said it would be fun to try to introduce a guest character who has it. But he expressed the same concern other producers have about putting such an accent on TV.

"So few people in the world know about it that when you tell them what the Pittsburgh accent sounds like, they're like, 'What the hell is that?'" he said. "The challenge is to find somebody who really can do it and sound honest and not like you're making fun of some Pittsburgher."