It didn't require a post-show interview to learn what three local news anchors thought of Fox's Pittsburgh-set sitcom "Back to You."

WTAE's Sally Wiggin laughed consistently while watching the pilot episode during a screening at the Post-Gazette last week. WPXI's David Johnson chuckled intermittently. KDKA's Sonni Abatta, seated between them, had a reaction that was, appropriately, in the middle.

"I think it follows the same formula as [the movie] 'Anchorman': funny sports guy, dopey anchorperson," Abatta said. "I thought it was funny; I thought it was engaging. I would definitely watch it again."

Wiggin and Abatta both liked a dramatic development in the midst of the comedy that added some heart to the show.

Wiggin said she watched "Back to You" thinking about a recent reunion of current and former WTAE staffers.

"We did all this reminiscing, and I did all that guffawing at things [on the show] that wouldn't mean anything to anybody else," she said, "so I'm not sure if my guffawing and laughter isn't caught up in the context of looking back."

Johnson was less enthusiastic.

"I enjoyed it a little," he said. "I thought it was pretty funny. They're great comic actors, and adding Fred Willard gives it a lot of weight as a comedy. I didn't love it, but I'll try it again, at least a few more times to see how it goes."

One thing all agreed on: Things that happen on the show may seem farfetched, but they're not.

"Some of that stuff said on the air and behind the scenes is crazy, and some of that stuff [on 'Back to You'] is not an exaggeration," Johnson said. "People I know who are doctors, I'll say I love 'ER' and they say, 'Well, that doesn't take place in one day,' but over the course of a few days or weeks or months, things like that will be said. ... I could go blow-by-blow beyond things they said [on 'Back to You']. That part doesn't bother me, that it's truly outrageous."

Johnson enjoyed the dialogue about how Chuck Darling (Kelsey Grammer) has fallen down the market rank ladder by returning to Pittsburgh. He remembered a former co-anchor who once worked with NBC's Brian Williams in Philadelphia.

"He used to say, 'There's Brian Williams at NBC, and here I am in Pittsburgh,'" Johnson said in a blustery voice. "He wasn't above taking a shot at himself about being down in Pittsburgh and the guy he'd worked with was at NBC News."

Wiggin liked the scene of a reporter standing in the cold and dark reporting from in front a courthouse where no news had been made for hours.

"How many reporters or anchors have you heard complain about that?" she said. "And Ken Rice is one of them. That would be something he would have fed the [writers]."

Rice said he didn't offer up that scene, and none of his concrete suggestions made it into the pilot or future episodes, "much to my chagrin," he said, laughing. "They used nothing other than general conceptual ideas." (We didn't invite Rice to the "Back to You" screening because he'd already seen it when he attended the April taping of the pilot in Los Angeles.)

On "Back to You," Darling runs through vocal exercises before going on the air. The three Pittsburgh anchors said they don't do that, but loudly clearing their throats isn't unusual. Johnson recalled once when Edye Tarbox (now Fox News Channel's E.D. Hill) missed the beginning of a newscast because she was doing vocal exercises in another studio.

"Back to You" also depicts a reporter who covets a chance to anchor, a familiar scenario, the anchors said, though real reporters are not generally as obvious as the reporter on "Back to You."

"But I actually have seen a reporter be fairly vocal about his disdain for anchors when in reality he wanted to be an anchor," Wiggin said.

Abatta, in her mid-20s, said she related to the idea of young people in the newsroom -- namely the news director, played by Josh Gad, whom Abatta knew in college at Carnegie Mellon University -- while Wiggin, 55, was struck by a line of dialogue from Kelly Carr (Patricia Heaton), who chastises Darling when he whines, "All the networks want is youth and hair."

"Please tell me you are not looking for sympathy about age discrimination from a woman in her 40s," Carr says.

"I find that's funny when she says 'a woman in her 40s,' because that's young now," Wiggin said. "You now have women moving into their 50s on the air. When she said 40s, I'm like, huh, that's considered old for women?"