UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — Six months ago, NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker came clean about his attempt to Americanize the British sitcom "Coupling." He admitted the show was bad from the get-go but he put it on the air hoping for a "miracle."

"In all candor, we knew we were in trouble when we saw the first taping of 'Coupling.' It just wasn't working," Zucker said.

But just how clean was he coming? And how much of that mea culpa was just another attempt at spin? Colin Ferguson, one of the show's stars, maintains it didn't happen that way at all.

"Oh, no, no, no," Ferguson said. "I think as we were making it, it was developing as it should."

And the people working on the show certainly didn't know they were riding the Titanic.

"It was good. It was fun. I enjoyed it," he said. "I enjoyed the people, and I enjoyed the experience."

Not that he was particularly surprised to hear Zucker say, after the fact, that the show was a train wreck from start to early finish.

"Once something is off the air, I think it's sort of their job to kill it. 'It was terrible. It's done. Don't ask any more questions about it. But look at this. This is great. Don't you like this?' " Ferguson said.

"Until two weeks later — 'No, that's crap. We're kidding. We've got this coming up,' " interjected Joseph Lawrence, the longtime TV star ("Gimme a Break," "Blossom," "American Dreams") who's co-starring with Ferguson and Jennifer Love Hewitt in the upcoming Oxygen channel movie "Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber."

Ferguson suggested that networks "redefine" the first few episodes of "any show as R&D as opposed to a product."

"Because then you can actually have the show develop without the scrutiny. . . . Like the old shows that everybody grew up on. They had this sort of time to develop."

Not that he's naive.

"That's not going to happen," he said.

Ferguson, for his part, gently pointed a finger of blame right back in Zucker's direction.

"I think we shot about 10 of them and right off the bat they wanted to use the British (scripts), which was hard because that was a 30-minute show (uninterrupted by commercials) and we were cutting it down to 19 minutes because (NBC) was supersizing 'Friends' and 'Will & Grace,' " he said. "So trying to deliver a show at 19 minutes is difficult just to begin with. That's why the original (American) episodes tailored for 19 minutes seemed to work better. And that's where we were going, anyway."

But nobody from NBC has called him and asked his advice about translating yet another hit Britcom, "The Office," for American TV.

"Oh, are they still doing that?" Ferguson said. "I thought they gave up.

"It's going to be a tough thing to pull off."

No doubt.

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com