IT’S ‘ME’ TIME E

Moynihan moves to primetime in new CBS series

BOBBY Moynihan turned 40 this year and had a child — which isn’t far from where the former “Saturday Night Live” trouper finds himself as the star of “Me,

Myself & I,” premiering Monday night on CBS.

“It was my life’s dream to be on ‘SNL’ and, to be honest, I naively didn’t think past that,” Moynihan says of landing the role after spending nine seasons on NBC’s late-night warhorse. “It was a combination of a lot of things happening. I knew my [‘SNL’] contract was coming up [for renewal] and I just got married and then my wife got pregnant. I’d seen what having babies had done to some minds [of people working at ‘SNL’], so it was time to think about the next step.”

That turned out to be “Me, Myself &I,” a multi-generational comedy in which Moynihan plays Alex, an LA-based inventor who’s hit a professional and personal midlife crisis after he runs out of ideas — and his cheating wife threatens to take their daughter, Abby (Skylar Gray), to San Francisco. “It’s really funny and is equally heartwarming and I liked the tone of it,” Moynihan says of the series. “It kind of reminds me of ‘The Wonder Years’ ... and I felt it was appropriate for my life at this time and seemed like a good fit.”

The series, created by Dan Kopelman, also flashes backward and forward to Alex as a 14-yearold, basketball-obsessed teen transplanted from Chicago to LA — and as a 65-year-old business exec who’s decided to retire. Jack Dylan Grazer plays the younger version of Alex; John Larroquette plays the older Alex. “I see them at table reads and try to pay attention to both of them, since I’m trying to incorporate their mannerisms and speech patterns into Alex,” Moynihan says of Grazer and Larroquette. “If we ever do appear in the same scene together it means we jumped the shark.” Moynihan says he’s filmed six “Me, Myself & I” episodes so far. “When I saw the pilot I thought, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ” he says. “The pilot has a beginning, a middle and an end. But then I read the next couple of scripts and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s exactly where we go from here.’ I feel like the second episode is almost a sequel to [the opener] — the quality is as good, if not better. And once we build that world, [the show] kind of takes a different turn. Later, you’ll see characters who we either met already, or you just didn’t know who they were when you first saw them. We have several different actors playing different characters in multiple timelines.”

Moynihan, who played many different fan favorites on “Saturday Night Live,” including “Drunk Uncle” — a bitter lush who often turned up on “Weekend Update” — says he doesn’t think any of those characters would translate to a TV series.

“On ‘SNL,’ most of my characters were pretty confident weirdos who had some terrible personal flaw,” he says. “I don’t know if people would want to sit through a half-hour of ‘Drunk Uncle’ spewing racist non-sequiturs.”