Kansas Citians get themselves on TV all the time. A game show here, a reality show there. They all have publicists, and all the publicists have my e-mail address.</p><p>These two are different.</p><p>Eric Stonestreet is a Piper High School graduate who is starring in the best-reviewed and most promising network comedy of the season. Adam Jamal Craig is an Olathe South grad who&rsquo;s backing up LL Cool J and Chris O&rsquo;Donnell in the &ldquo;NCIS&rdquo; spin-off that&rsquo;s expected to make the biggest debut of anything on television this fall.</p><p>Their stories &mdash; how they got to that rarefied air of a network show poised for breakout success &mdash; are very different. And yet both actors are uncannily alike in one key respect: They found something they liked to do, and they stuck with it. Only then came the shock and awe of the big break.</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">From improv to &lsquo;Modern Family&rsquo;</span></strong></p><p>Eric Stonestreet fell in love with improvisational comedy while attending Kansas State University. Still, he admits today, &ldquo;When I left college for Chicago, I didn&rsquo;t know if I wanted to be an actor.&rdquo;</p><p> There was only one way to know and that was to move to the improv capital. Chicago, with its comedy factories Second City and IO (short for Improv Olympic), trained the likes of John Belushi and Gilda Radner, Andy Richter and Amy Poehler.</p><p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a very big, imposing guy and very funny and sweet,&rdquo; recalls Charna Halpern, who co-founded IO with the late Del Close. Stonestreet wound up studying both under Close and a then-obscure actress named Tina Fey. </p><p>&ldquo;She was my Level II teacher when I was at the Second City,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure a lot of people can make that claim now.&rdquo;</p><p>Within a few months, any doubt about a career vanished when he scored a commercial contract as the Purple Guy. The football program at Northwestern University wanted someone to appear in TV ads in full body paint being wild and crazy with team members. It called for a larger-than-life presence and an ability to make up lines as the camera rolled. Stonestreet fit the bill and eventually scored a follow-up deal with the NCAA going wild about other teams, including (gulp) the Kansas Jayhawks. Hey, that&rsquo;s why they call it acting, right?</p><p>When Stonestreet felt he was ready to move to Los Angeles, he decided to focus squarely on smaller parts that would utilize his comic talents and versatility.</p><p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll never forget when I moved out here somebody said to me, &lsquo;Oh, you gonna be the next lifeguard on &ldquo;Baywatch&rdquo;?&rsquo;&ensp;&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Well, I said, I might be the next ambulance driver on &lsquo;Baywatch,&rsquo; or a paramedic or a homeless guy &mdash; but probably not a lifeguard.&rdquo;</p><p>Meanwhile, the TV sitcom was exhausting itself, and a new type of half-hour comedy, the mockumentary, was starting to catch on. Cable shows like &ldquo;Curb Your Enthusiasm&rdquo; and &ldquo;Reno 911!&rdquo;, then an American adaptation of &ldquo;The Office&rdquo; for NBC, all favored the improv actor whose talent at setting a tone was more important than reciting a script.</p><p>More recently, NBC gave Poehler her own mocku-comedy, &ldquo;Parks and Recreation,&rdquo; and TBS hired another Kansas City-to-Chicago talent, John Lehr, to help create and star in an all-improv sitcom called &ldquo;10 Items or Less.&rdquo;</p><p>&ldquo;The mainstream is starting to see how important improv is,&rdquo; IO&rsquo;s Halpern says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been told by casting directors in L.A. that they always take a look at people from IO and Chicago, because those people really take time to get good.&rdquo;