Louis-Dreyfus waited four seasons before Watching Ellie - a sitcom set in real time, with a ticking clock in the lower left-hand corner of the screen to prove it - crashed and burned on NBC. She waited another two to launch Christine, now considered a mild hit on CBS.

"Having a hit is difficult, and once you have a hit, getting another one is really difficult," Louis-Dreyfus said shortly before Christine aired. "But that mustn't keep you from trying, and it certainly hasn't kept me from trying. Mainly, I just love doing this. I love acting. So I just keep batting at the ball."

Neil Patrick Harris is another who found it difficult to shed his image, that of boy genius on ABC's Doogie Howser, M.D., which ended its four-year run in 1993. He waited around long enough to strike gold with the CBS comedy How I Met Your Mother, choosing to be part of an ensemble, not the show's star. Now the stealer of nearly every scene of the second-year show, he is, like Louis-Dreyfus, considered a star a second time over.

"Being the star of a show wasn't the idea," Harris admits. "It sounds cliché, but it was about the work. You do a good job with the character and people are bound to forget what you did before. People used to call me Doogie, not knowing my real name. They still don't know. Now they call me Barney."

If only White could get that. He returned to TV right after Family Matters with Grown Ups, playing a suave marketing exec, nothing like Urkel. It didn't last a season. TV, says White, who's in the feature film Dreamgirls, "is a game of patience and opportunity. Life can change in the simplest, and oddest, ways."