He's been fired from SNL. ABC axed Norm after two seasons. For Norm Macdonald, holding down a job ain't easy. But this fall, he returns to TV on A Minute with Stan Hooper, which has scored highly with Fox's test audiences and has good early buzz. Was the cranky comic surprised by this warm reception?

"I wasn't surprised, because a couple of years ago, I got kicked out of show business," Macdonald joked to reporters at the Television Critics Assoc. press tour in Hollywood. "So then, I took a little hiatus from it. I returned to my first love of just doing nothing, drinking whiskey, that sort of thing. And it gave me time to reflect."

And what did this period of fuzzy navel-gazing leave him with, besides a killer hangover? The idea to do a sitcom set in a quirky small town. "That'd be the coolest, to have a small-town show," he recalled thinking. "'Cause I've seen a few in the last few year, but they all seem to suck."

In Stan Hooper, Macdonald is an Andy Rooney-like newsmagazine commentator who moves away from Manhattan so he can do his chatty TV segments from an actual American hamlet. Penelope Ann Miller and Fred Willard co-star.

"I really wanted to do a show where I was in the center of the show, and could react to very funny people around me," Macdonald explained. "You know, 'cause those are always the shows I like. I don't like shows where a guy's really funny in the center, and nobody else is funny. Because I'm not that funny!"