Title 'Cougar Town' seemed like a good idea: It's truly terrible, but the show has turned into something good

A year ago, Bill Lawrence was telling us what a great title "Cougar Town" was.

"In the modern landscape of television, obviously, that title is intended to be a noisy title," said the executive producer/co-creator of ABC sitcom. "It makes people take notice."

Lawrence wasn't just selling the title, he was selling it hard. "Cougar" is a pejorative applied to older women pursuing younger men, but the ever-affable Lawrence tried to sell at as something the National Organization for Women might endorse.

"I've heard both sides of it — being a misogynistic word and a word of empowerment," he said.

Empowerment? What Lawrence was really hoping was that it would empower the show's ratings. Because in the crowded television landscape, a title that makes people take notice might also make them tune in. In TV, controversy is almost always good.

Even if you have to create it yourself.

Lawrence said "Cougar Town" wouldn't have gotten noticed at all "if the show was called 'Forty and Single' or 'Getting to Have Your Twenties.' I think that, right now, the hardest thing in network television is to make noise and to get people to sample something.

"So the roll of the dice I've made — and … it's a risky roll of the dice — is that the title is noisy and that people will be aware of this show. The downside of the risk is if there's a group of people that say, 'Hey, I'm not going to watch this because the title bums me (out).' "

A year later, Lawrence has changed his mind. In recent interviews, he has acknowledged that, while his roll of the dice didn't come up snake eyes, it also didn't pay off as well as he'd hoped.

And the studio and network are at least talking about changing the title because their research shows that some viewers won't watch a show titled "Cougar Town."

Because they aren't interested in watching a comedy about a 40-something woman who sleeps with a series of younger men.

That's pretty much the show "Cougar Town" started out to be; it is most definitely not the show it became during its first season.

When "Cougar Town" premiered, Jules (Courteney Cox) was a just-divorced woman who had been married since she was 19. This was her first chance to be a single adult, and she was, um, taking advantage of it with younger men.