BURBANK, California (AP) — The core cast of the freshman CBS sitcom “The Class” is crammed around a dining table on a Warner Bros. soundstage rehearsing a dinner-party scene.Lina’s done the cooking and Richie is apologising sotto voce for the result.

Kat, Duncan, Kyle and Ethan, meanwhile, are trying not to gag on the Moroccan chicken dish Lina’s concocted, while Nicole has an excuse for not eating at all — she’s dieting.

Genuine laughter flows from crew members, especially after legendary sitcom director James Burrows deftly tweaks an actor’s move or timing.

It’s an example of how the CBS series about members of a third-grade class rediscovering each other in adulthood is reassembling itself, literally, to try to improve the ratings.

Last summer, co-creator David Crane told a gathering of television critics he hoped “The Class” (Mondays, 9.30 p.m. Bermuda time) would “have a different feeling from a lot of the shows we’ve seen before.”

The aim was to take a cue from reality series and follow the lives of many more characters than the normal handful of buddies on, say, “Friends”’ or “Seinfeld”. Characters would “intersect” at times, but most episodes would focus on their individual stories.

So after the pilot episode, where the former classmates had all met up at a party thrown by Ethan (Jason Ritter) for a fiancee who then dumped him, the characters veered off into separate story lines.

Viewers veered off, too, though. Still, CBS had faith in the creators’ successful track record (“Friends”, “Mad About You”) and the appeal of the attractive young cast. So the series has stayed on the air, even as it morphs into a more traditional ensemble format.

“I think what we are finding is what works best is when we get together as a group,” says Sean Maguire, who plays a gay school teacher, Kyle.

“It was a really great idea to try to do a soap opera in 30 minutes with all the different story lines ... but there was just too much going on,” reasons Lizzy Caplan, who plays the initially acerbic but now vulnerable Kat, Lina’s twin sister.

“We all wanted to work together, so it’s pretty awesome that we now do overlap, and there seems more time each week to really flesh out a full story.”

While the cast appreciates the creators’ effort to do something different, they welcome the show’s reconfiguration.

“We were sort of hungry to be acting with each other, so I definitely dig it,” says Jon Bernthal, who plays Duncan, who still lives with his mother and still loves Nicole (Andrea Anders), though she’s now married to Yonk, a retired football star (David Keith).

Bernthal feels that, despite the changes, the series maintains a strong “revolutionary” element because “it does deal with pretty dark topics in a very traditional, well-lit, safe sitcom world. And I find that interesting.”

The oddball character of Richie (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), who was about to commit suicide when the phone rang to ask him to Ethan’s party, is an example of the darker-themed humour. And his link-up with the equally off-kilter Lina (Heather Goldenhersh) was hardly meet-cute. He broke her legs when he backed his car into her. Lina’s back on her feet, but their relationship is not yet as steady.

Broadway stage actors Ferguson and Goldenhersh are fresh to the sitcom format.

Goldenhersh admits that it took time to learn the skills needed to cope with the rhythms of the genre, the limited rehearsal time, constant input from myriad network executives and endless rewrites.

“I’m having a ball now, but it’s been a rocky adjustment because it’s all about the laugh,” she said, confessing that early on, when laughter seemed hard to come by, she took it too personally and would cry when her dialogue was rewritten.

Like the rest of the cast, Ferguson gives major credit to Burrows for helping them find all laughs possible: “He has an innate sense of timing and rhythm. You are in the safest possible hands, but also you know we are all hired because of our comic instincts, so a lot did come naturally.”

Ritter, son of the late John Ritter, sees the cast’s varied professional backgrounds and acting methods as an interesting plus.

“Some people start from the inner place and move to an outer place, and some start from the outer and move to the inner. But, hopefully, you can’t tell which one is doing what.”