Fall Preview: CBS' Made in Jersey

Made in Jersey stars British import Janet Montgomery

Last season, her second working on the Los Angeles writing staff of Franklin & Bash, the cable drama about two wisecracking men, Dana Calvo realized she had something a little softer to say.

A lifelong fan of female-focused shows like Sex and the City, Calvo says she enjoyed watching that show’s fabulous foursome frolic around Manhattan, “and yet I always felt, ‘Wait, where’s the family?’  So I decided to write a show about a young woman and her life in full – friends, family and work.  I know it’s not really cool to say, but I wanted to write about a family that is warm and loving and wholesome.”

Drawing on memories of Christmases spent with her Italian-American extended family, the Moorestown, NJ native created the comedic drama Made in Jersey and its heroine Martina Garretti, whose life and career straddle both sides of the Hudson River.  A lawyer like Calvo’s own sister, Martina crosses between her homespun life in the Garden State and her new job as a first-year associate at a prestigious New York law firm.  Right away, just as in Working Girl – one of Calvo’s inspirations – Martina catches the attention of the firm’s founder, Donovan Stark (Kyle MacLachlan) with her unique body of knowledge.

Calvo knew that making Made in Jersey work would depend on finding just the right leading lady to convey Martina’s combination of street and book smarts.  “I had a dream that we were going to cast a Jersey girl right off a turnip truck, and her real story would mirror Martina Garretti’s,” Calvo remembers with a laugh.  Instead, after considering more than 100 candidates, producers consulted with their casting director in the UK.  There, in a video audition, was 26-year-old British actress Janet Montgomery.  As Calvo explains, “I saw the tape, and knew right away ‘That’s her!’”

New Jersey has been heating up for more than a decade, from the time of The Sopranos to today’s current spate of reality shows featuring big hair and even bigger drama.  And that’s lucky for an English girl who needs to learn how to tawk.  Montgomery says she’d never previously spent any Jerseylicious time with the state’s Real Housewives – but once she started her research, “those shows are totally addictive.  I watched a lot of them – and then I was told not to, because we don’t want our show to be that over-the-top.  Still, I feel they gave me a good idea of what Martina would have grown up around.”

Montgomery worked with a dialect coach, and says that once she stepped out of her trailer in Martina’s considerable coif and jangly charm bracelet, she was able to find the character’s voice, which she says “now is second nature.  I deliberately started big, but reined it back in to something that, while it’s obviously a working-class accent, shows that she’s also an educated lawyer.”  The actress says she loves that Made in Jersey is a unique hybrid of law procedural and family drama – and so does CBS, so much so that after viewing the original pilot, the impressed network requested the addition of a few more scenes with Martina’s mom (Donna Murphy) and the rest of the garrulous Garrettis.

“Family is really important to knowing who Martina is,” Montgomery explains, adding that her own working-class upbringing as the daughter of a postal worker has given her a particular appreciation for the character.  “I don’t have anyone else in my family working in this industry.  And so this character whose lives at work and at home are so different, and who has a family who are very supportive and yet don’t fully understand her job – it’s been so much like my own life, it’s really amazing.”

Made In Jersey

Premieres Friday, September 28

9 PM Eastern / 8 PM Central

CBS

Fall Preview: CBS' Elementary

Elementary stars Lucy Liu and
Jonny Lee Miller

When producer Carl Beverly first posed the idea to Rob Doherty of transplanting Sherlock Holmes to present-day New York, the writer’s response was Elementary.

“I daresay Sherlock is the most popular character in literary pop culture from the last 100 years,” enthuses 

Doherty; perhaps that’s why there have been so many prior filmic depictions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s prototypical detective.  Doherty says it was “one of the wonderful little details that Doyle crafted a very long time ago” that became the key to Elementary, his new CBS series adaptation starring Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu.  The 19^th Century Holmes was famously addicted to opiates, “and that’s the way I’ve always looked at him, as an addict,” the writer explains – and not just to drugs.  “He’s driven by and very much addicted to what he does for a living.  He enjoys unfolding the origami of a crime, matching wits with someone who thinks he’s smart enough to get away with something horrible, and bringing that person to justice.”

Yes, this new Holmes does have a literal addiction to deal with, too.  Having just returned from rehab – a vanishing he explained to his local police contact, Captain Toby Gregson (Aidan Quinn), as a holiday in his native London – the hyper-observant detective “was previously used to being so ahead of everyone, and oozed confidence,” Doherty says.  “Now he’s left rattled, concerned that he may not be what he used to.  I liked the idea of a person like him feeling a little bit of doubt for the first time.”

That’s where Lucy Liu’s Dr. Joan Watson comes in.  As a former surgeon haunted by her role in the death of a patient, Watson has now gone into business as a sober companion, hired by Holmes’ concerned dad to keep him in line.  That means accompanying him everywhere, where the new duo finds that “as a doctor, obviously she has many skills in forensic science,” Miller says.  “So Holmes begins to realize that she’s not just a companion, but she’s very useful.”

It was Doherty’s innovation both to alter this Watson’s occupation and to make Watson for the first time a female, who, he says, “has much of the empathy Holmes is missing.  In that way, she completes him.”  As the writer praises, Liu brings her innate strength to Watson, who needs to be able to stand up to this quirky and demanding Holmes. But it’s also their characters’ more vulnerable moments that both Miller and Liu say attracted them to Elementary.  Watson, Liu says, “is not going in with her ‘sober companion’ coat on.  I like that she’s trying to bring a certain sense of humanity and understanding to her client.”

Miller adds that “one of the things that struck me, reading [Doyle’s] books, is how colorful and funny the characters are.”  Doherty fully intends to weave that same wit into Elementary, which is why he is excited that Miller’s embodiment of Holmes exhibits “a warmth, intelligence, and a fantastic sense of humor.”

But perhaps the most important quality that both Miller and Liu are bringing to their new show is  appreciation.  In filming Elementary’s pilot, “the first time I heard Jonny say ‘Watson!’ it was a thrill to be creating that, to be part of history,” Liu reveals.  The British-born Miller feels it, too.  “There’s a reason why the Holmes stories keep being retold and redone,” he theorizes.  “People play Hamlet a lot, and always want to play Shakespeare.  Good stories and good characters come back.” 

Elementary

Premieres Thursday, September 27

10 PM Eastern / 9 PM Central

CBS

Fall Preview: CBS' Vegas

Vegas stars (l-r) Dennis Quaid, Michael Chiklis

This past spring, after actor Michael Chiklis met with Ralph Lamb, the real-life inspiration for Chiklis and Dennis Quaid’s new western drama Vegas, “I walked away from lunch, called my wife, and said, ‘Wow! We have stories for years!”

In the mid 2000s, the MGM movie studio had commissioned a big-screen bio based on Lamb, a fourth-generation rancher who served as Las Vegas’ Sheriff from 1960 to 1978, the period in which the soon-to-be gambling and entertainment mecca was rising from empty desert.  The studio turned to author and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, who had already depicted the period in his 1995 film Casino.  But even as the writer’s first outline was delivered, everyone involved realized that with Lamb’s wealth of amazing stories, his life would make a great ongoing series instead.

“It’s kind of what I call the low-hanging fruit of Sheriff Lamb,” says Greg Walker, who, after Pileggi then turned the idea into television, was brought on board as the showrunner of Vegas.  “Every story Lamb tells, you just realize it’s a no-brainer.  They’re filled with such rich detail.  With such vivid characters, you can’t help but think about how his world could come to life on screen.”

Reading Pileggi’s pilot, “I got to page five, and was hooked,” Walker remembers.  “As soon as the DC-6 flew over Lamb’s cattle, I was in.  I loved the clash between the modern world and the Old West.”  Quaid, too, cites that first script as what lured him to play the colorful sheriff in this, his first television series.  Vegas pits Quaid’s Lamb against Chiklis’ Vincent Savino, a Chicago gangster and savvy businessman with designs on the budding gaming empire.  “It’s a story about how all that power corrupts on both sides,” says Quaid.  “Because the lines in Vegas were hazy back then.  It was a different set of rules.”

“In Vegas, you have two men who are thrust into the spotlight of being kings,” Walker explains.  “One who wants it, in Savino, and one who’s reluctant, in Lamb.”  With the face-off between the two men and their allies – including on Lamb’s side, his younger brother Jack (Jason O’Mara) and the town’s Assistant District Attorney Katherine O’Connell (Carrie Ann Moss) – as its underlying construct, “we created a hybrid procedural and character-based drama,” Walker says.  “The show has the adrenaline and satisfaction of solving a mystery, but at the same time, there are multiple characters’ stories getting more and more complicated, with greed, envy and desire whirling around this world of crime.”

With Vegas’ 1960 setting, Lamb and his deputies won’t be enforcing the law using fingerprints or computers or cell phones like in that other Vegas-set mystery, CSI.  “He is also not a guy who’s going to put a gun in people’s faces week to week,” Walker says. “He’s going to solve things with his own hands, man-to-man.”  That type of character, the showrunner says, “is something Dennis is uniquely equipped to play.  There are very few men who have that kind of stillness, that raw, masculine power.  We just don’t build them like that anymore.”

Vegas’ pilot was shot, coincidentally, in the small town of Las Vegas, NM, where an old commercial row, last updated in the early 20^th Century, could be gussied up with props and CGI neon to look like the Fremont Street of ‘60s Sin City; the series will build it all from the ground up in Santa Clarita, CA.  Undoubtedly, today’s audience will be paying close attention to all that period detail, because we’re so intrigued by the town’s formative years.

“We’re all interested in how Vegas became Vegas.  Today it’s a fantasy world where you can get anything you want, and to watch how that was made is very captivating,” Walker notes.  Like Lamb, the town itself is a natural for a Hollywood treatment, its story comprising two cinematic archetypes, the cowboy and the mobster.  “These are two worlds that we’re very familiar with, but we haven’t ever seen them together.  When they collide, there’s something very electric.”

Vegas

Premieres Tuesday, September 25

10 PM Eastern / 9 Central

CBS

Fall Preview: CBS' Partners

Partners stars (l-r):
Brandon Routh, Michael Urie,
David Krumholtz, Sophia Bush

By David Kohan’s estimation, he and Max Mutchnick have been friends for over 35 years, and writing partners for more than 20.  Such a multi-purpose relationship can have its challenges, but Kohan and Mutchnick’s has yielded impressive results; in 1998, drawing on Max’s own real-life experiences, the creative duo brought us TV’s first gay leading man in the landmark sitcom Will & Grace.

Now, much like that long-running hit was the first to capture the age-old relationship between a gay man and his devoted best galpal, the writers’ new, equally autobiographical comedy Partners corners the market on friendship between two men of differing sexual orientations.

Of course, as Kohan notes, their real-life relationship – and thus the one between their Partners alter egos Louis (Ugly Betty’s Michael Urie) and Joe (Numb3rs’ David Krumholtz) – can be muddied by much more than just that one superficial distinction.  “The fact is, our sensibilities about everything are really different.” True to stereotype, Kohan admits, he loves sports, whereas Mutchnick’s tastes run more towards clothes and design.  But their true spark comes more from differences in temperament.  “Max has never met a boundary that he didn’t want to smash, and I deal with my resentment passive-aggressively.  It makes for an interesting contrast.  And so the fact that one of us is straight and one is gay is part of our deal, but it’s not the essential factor.”

As the writer explains, he and Mutchnick were motivated to turn the mirror on themselves in recent years, as they have suddenly found themselves seriously romantically involved with other people.  “For us, it raised a lot of questions about what makes for a great partnership,” Kohan says.  “Where are the pressures?  What are the best forms of communication?  What are the lies that we tell each other?  What are the truths that we tell each other?  And where do the conflicts arise?”  In parsing all of this out in their own real lives, “we realized this seemed like a rich, fertile area for comedy.”

In all, Partners depicts the dynamics of three relationships -- not just between New York architectural design firm partners Louis and Joe, but also those of Louis and his nurse boyfriend Wyatt (Brandon Routh) and of Joe and his now-fiancée Ali (Sophia Bush) – and shows how the multiple couplings both cross-pollenate and complicate.  As meddlesome Louis, “I get to be Max Mutchnick,” enthuses Urie.  The part, he was pleased to discover, “comes with a lot of inspiration, because these two guys, in their real-life dynamic together, are so entertaining.”

“It’ll be interesting to mine their relationship further as the show goes forward, because they put on a show,” Krumholtz agrees.  “Max and David don’t know it -- or maybe they do -- but their working relationship is very out there for everyone to see, and it’s hilarious.  It’s really just a matter of capturing it on paper, and there’s a lot more there.  I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface with them yet.”

Indeed, Kohan says the nicest surprise so far for him has been to witness how Urie and Krumholtz effortlessly come off as bickering old friends.  But neither actor is surprised by the instant chemistry.  “Any great bromance I’ve ever had is with someone who makes me laugh,” Urie says.  And, Krumholtz adds, “We have the same head for funny.”

Partners

Premieres Monday, September 24

8:30 PM Eastern / 7:30 PM Central

CBS

The New Normal Continues a Fine Tradition

Actor Eddie Barbanell appears in
tonight's episode of The New Normal,
"Baby Clothes,"
9:30 PM Eastern on NBC

In their new fall series The New Normal, writers Ryan Murphy and Ali Adler have already created two groundbreaking characters for primetime TV, gay wannabe dads.  Now, with tonight's airing of the series' third episode, the writers will be continuing another pioneering tradition which Murphy has long followed with his acclaimed shows:  providing work and visibility for the disabled community by featuring actor(s) with Down Syndrome.

Back in July at the TV Critics' Association convention in Beverly Hills, I asked Murphy what had inspired him to write a guest-starring spot for actor Blair Williamson on his long-running FX drama Nip/Tuck -- and then to continue to create regular roles for actors with DS on his later shows Glee and American Horror Story.   "It certainly made sense [to include characters with DS] for Glee.  And it made sense when we were [planning] American Horror Story," Murphy explained.  "People ask me that all the time, if I have [Down Syndrome] in my life or if I know somebody.  No, but I've always just been very moved by the stories that I've heard, and I like writing those characters."

Murphy may be responsible for much of the current trend (which of course famously may have begun with actor Chris Burke's role as Corky on the 1989-93 ABC series Life Goes On), but other producers have tapped into Hollywood's community of actors with DS as well; this past February, Entertainment Weekly profiled prominent actors within the community, including Glee's Lauren Potter, The Secret Life of the American Teenager's Luke Zimmerman, and American Horror Story's Jamie Brewer.

The founder of a group called Down Syndrome in Arts & Media (DSiAM), Blair Williamson's mother Gail works with about 200 aspiring actors nationwide, all while advocating to bring attention to the issues which can particularly affect individuals with DS.  Recently, DSiAM was involved in bringing three Glee actresses together for a photo shoot, both to honor that show's commitment to DS and to bring attention to a health problem to which those with Down Syndrome are prone.

Three generations of Glee girls:  (l-r):
Lauren Potter, 22; Jordyn Orr, 8 months; Robin Trocki, 55
Photo by Shandon Youngclaus of Amazing Headshots

Individuals with DS have a high incidence of developing Alzheimer's disease; it's believed this is because an indicator for the disease is located on the triplicate 21st chromosome responsible for DS.  Until the death of her character, Sue Sylvester's older sister Jean, actress Robin Trocki appeared on five episodes of Glee.  Now at 55, Robin is exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease, and her family is coming forward with her story in order to raise funding for medical research.

In Glee's first episode this season, there was no mention of Sue Sylvester's new baby having DS, but a beautiful close-up of her new daughter Robin -- named in honor of Robin Trocki -- made it apparent that the baby, played by 8-month-old Jordyn Orr, has the syndrome.  And so the photo shoot, featuring Glee's three generations of gals with DS -- Trocki, little Jordyn, and 22-year-old Lauren Potter, aka the deliciously devilish Cheerio/Sue Sylvester henchman Becky Jackson -- was planned, as Gail Williamson explains, "for Robin to meet Jordyn Orr while she still has memory of her work on Glee."

"Researchers are hopeful that they will have a vaccine to prevent Alzheimer’s before Lauren Potter reaches the age for symptoms," Williamson says hopefully.  "And just think of what kind of medical intervention they may have by the time Jordyn Orr reaches adulthood."

left-to-right:  Lauren Potter, Jordyn Orr, Gail Williamson, Robin Trocki
Photo by Shandon Youngclaus of Amazing Headshots

(For those in the Los Angeles area:  this Thursday, September 20 at 7 PM, Gail and Blair Williamson, along with Potter, Brewer, Zimmerman and other actors with DS will be appearing for a SAG/AFTRA-sponsored panel discussion, "Ready and Able:  Working Actors with Down Syndrome."  Click here for more info.)

A Still-Golden Anniversary: 20 Years Since Debut of Failed Spinoff Golden Palace

For seven seasons, The Golden Girls brought groundbreaking comedy to the small screen, and made icons of its four leading ladies.  Then in 1992, three of the Girls packed up the house on Miami’s Richmond Street, and moved to the beach – and to CBS.

The Cast of Golden Palace (1992-93).
  Back:  Cheech Marin as chef Chuy Castillos;
Don Cheadle as desk clerk Roland Wilson;
Billy L. Sullivan as Oliver Webb;
Front:  Rue McClanahan, Betty White, Estelle Getty

With schoolteacher Dorothy Zbornak now married and living in Atlanta – after actress Bea Arthur had opted out of The Golden Girls, thus ending the series – her roommates Blanche and Rose moved to Golden Palace, making the odd, life-changing decision to invest their savings in the show’s titular hotel.  Stranger still, Dorothy had even left her by now nearly nonagenarian mother Sophia behind; soon, after some financial miscalculations, the three women found themselves putting in backbreaking hours of cooking and cleaning as the Art Deco District’s most unlikely hoteliers.

Producer Tony Thomas remembers the decision to take the three remaining Girls in such a new direction.  “You don’t replace Bea – it would have been ridiculous to have someone try,” he explains.  Thomas says that he and fellow producers, Golden Girls creator Susan Harris and her husband Paul Witt, “have always liked the idea of doing a show about life in a hotel.  There’s something appealing about a core cast in such a transient setting.”

“We wanted to show these woman as still vital and active,” Witt adds.  “So taking over a small hotel would put them in contact on a regular basis with interesting people, and keep them active as they learned to do something different.  We couldn’t do ‘Golden Girls Redux’ or ‘Golden Girls Continued.’  We had to make it different and hopefully comfortable.”

The Old College Try

The cast of Golden Palace boasted not only three sitcom heavyweights in Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty, but also comedy legend Cheech Marin, and future House of Lies star Don Cheadle as the hotel’s desk clerk, Roland Wilson.  And like the Girls before it, Palace also boasted some of today’s hottest comedy writing talents among its staff. 

But writer Mitchell Hurwitz, who would later create CBS’ sitcom The Ellen Show before finding fame with Arrested Development, remembers his colleagues’ unease with the Palace premise from the start.  “People really related to The Golden Girls.  The husband leaves, which was something a lot of women had gone through in that generation,” he notes.  But with Golden Palace, “now we were asking the audience to relate to having to run and manage a hotel, and clean the rooms yourself.  It was an interesting premise, which created a lot of opportunities for comedy, but it wasn’t what people came to The Golden Girls for.”

In the 2006 interview I conducted, via the Archive of American Television, with McClanahan, who died in 2010, she also remembered the difficulties in transferring her character Blanche to the new seaside setting.  “We gave it the good old college try, but [Golden Palace] wasn’t the right thing to do.  It took the center out of the characters as they had been established – particularly Blanche.  She had to become a businesswoman, and run a hotel.  How did she learn how to do that?  Where did that come from?  It required more out of the Blanche character than ever before, and I found it very hard to find the way to play it.”  Presenting the Girls without their popular fourth friend Dorothy, McClanahan recalled, “really was like walking without one shoe.”

AfterG*I*R*L*S

Premiering on September 18, 1992 as part of CBS’ new two-hour comedy block, Golden Palace won its 8 PM time slot for its first few weeks.  But soon, the entire night began to sink in the ratings.  For every rare case like Frasier, which would premiere the next fall and would last eleven seasons, there is an AfterM*A*S*H, or a Joey.  And Golden Palace would soon prove to belong to the latter category of sequel series.

“Golden Palace was ill-conceived from the start,” says another former writer, Marc Cherry, who went on to create CBS’ sitcoms The Five Mrs. Buchanans and Some of My Best Friends before his iconic Desperate Housewives (and now, Lifetime's eagerly anticipated new series Devious Maids.)  “Old ladies just don’t go around buying hotels.”

Still, Cherry says, “Golden Palace is no [tacky ‘80s syndicated sitcom] Small Wonder.  There are moments of the show that are actually quite good.”  One particularly touching episode, he agrees, featured Ned Beatty as Blanche’s heretofore unmentioned, mentally challenged brother.  In another, lifelong animal activist Betty White was able to highlight the sad plight of greyhounds discarded by Florida racetracks.  In a two-part episode, Arthur’s Dorothy returned to visit her old friends in their new setting, bringing with her an hour’s worth of that old Golden magic.  And throughout its 24-episode run, Golden Palace sported cameos from the biggest stars of yesteryear, like George Burns, Eddie Albert, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, and gave early breaks not just to Cheadle, but other future comedy stars like Jack Black, Margaret Cho and Bill Engvall.

“With a little more time, I think we could have gotten [Golden Palace] to be very good – but we didn’t get there,” Witt remembers.  In the spring of 1993, Palace was cancelled after its freshman season,  along with the entire Friday comedy block.

Although Cherry says that he worried at the time that the sub-par Golden Palace would end up tarnishing the memory of its parent series, many fans have come to see the show as the Girls’ de facto eighth season.  Unlike Girls, Palace is not available on DVD – but it caused a sensation in the mid 2000’s when Lifetime briefly tacked its episodes onto the end of its regular Golden Girls run.

Marin, who went on to star in CBS’ shows Nash Bridges and Rob, remembers an additional Palace legacy.  Conscious of Miami as a rich ethnic and racial melting pot, the show’s producers had hired the Mexican-American actor to play the hotel’s Cuban chef Chuy Castillos; Marin says he used to refer to himself and Cheadle, surrounded by older white ladies, as “the Afro-Cuban section of the Lawrence Welk band.”

Marin says his greatest memory of Golden Palace was working with co-star Getty – but not in any moment that showed up on screen.  “She taught me to make a great matzoh ball, and boy, it just makes them nice and fluffy,” the 66-year-old actor remembers.  “I make great matzoh ball soup to this day, for which I’m eternally grateful – as are my children.”

Meet The New Normal

It’s going to be a tough season for the comedy department at NBC, with two of its most beloved (if not highly-rated) hits, bowing out.  After 30 Rock calls it quits after 13 episodes this fall, and The Office at the end of the year, the network once known as the home of “Must-See” comedy will need to find some laughs, fast.

The cast of The New Normal, left to right:
Justin Bartha, Andrew Rannells, Georgia King,
Bebe Wood, Ellen Barkin, Nene Leakes

NBC does seem to be pinning its hopes on one new comedy.  From Ryan Murphy, the out gay creator of Glee and American Horror Story, and out lesbian writer Ali Adler, The New Normal is a politically incorrect yet warm look at a gay male couple and the (literally) surrogate family they build in an attempt to have a baby.

Just this week, it seemed like another sign of NBC’s faith in The New Normal when the network announced a special preview of the show’s pilot this coming Monday, September 10 at 10 PM/9 PM Central; they’re hoping to get the show sampled by the viewers of its lead-in that night, the season premiere of The Voice.  The very next night, September 11, The New Normal will settle into its regular timeslot, of Tuesdays at 9:30/8:30 Central.

(Of course, you don’t have to wait until Monday to see the New Normal pilot:  you can watch it right here.)

Back in July, at the semi-annual convention for TV critics in Beverly Hills, I sat down with the show’s male leads, The Hangover’s Justin Bartha and Andrew Rannells, who made a huge splash with Broadway’s Book of Mormon and recently appeared on HBO’s Girls, to talk all about what it means to be Normal.

Must-Hear TV:  As we head into a presidential election where one of the divisive issues is gay rights, what attracted you to this show, with its unavoidable gay storyline and themes?

Justin Bartha:  The main thing was quality.  The quality of the script, and the quality of the people involved.  The show is relevant.  It seems timely and seems necessary, and it is hilarious.  Everything attracted me to this show.

Andrew Rannells:  I definitely echo that sentiment.  Also, I think that Ryan Murphy’s brand of comedy, the way that he handles topical material – in this case, this homosexual couple, that was very appealing to me.  As a homosexual, that I get to be a part of something like that is very exciting.  So there was a long list of reasons why this seemed to be a great thing to get involved in. And the show has definitely held up to all of those expectations as we’ve developed it.

with The New Normal's Andrew Rannells and Justin Bartha
at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Beverly Hills, CA
July 2012

MHTV:  You both have theater backgrounds – Andrew in Book of Mormon, and Justin, I saw you in 2010 in Lend Me a Tenor.  When you test for a TV pilot, you have to agree to sign away 7 years of your life if it gets picked up, which might not leave much time for Broadway.  This must have been some helluva script – enough to make you want to do TV?

JB:  It’s a similar answer to the first question – it’s all about quality.  For me, everything I was reading just wasn’t that interesting.  And it didn’t seem to matter.  This show seems to matter, and it’s something to be proud of.  And if I could be proud of something for seven years, I’m down with that.

AR:  Absolutely.  I think that television offers an interesting opportunity.  If you’re lucky enough to have some longevity, you get to cover a multitude of issues.  I think that Ryan and Ali Adler definitely are the people to do that.  To bring topical humor to a half-hour format is very exciting.

MHTV:  It’s amazing that we still have to talk about this in 2012, but is there ever any concern for either of you as an actor about playing a gay character?

JB:  Andrew and I both come at this question from very interesting perspectives.  Because I’m a straight man and he’s a gay man.  Both have a little bit of a stigma playing gay characters, or being “out” in a sense.  You, Andrew, obviously have more at stake, because it’s your personal life attached.

MHTV:  But you do, too, Justin, because people might be eager to nitpick the way a straight actor chooses to “play gay.”  Or maybe they think the actor himself must be secretly gay.

JB:  For me personally, I thrive off of those things.  I don’t give a shit what people think about me.  I think if everyone thinks I’m gay, I’m flattered.  And if people are so small-minded that they can’t see past sexuality in creativity, then I don’t want to work for them anyway.

So it’s as simple as that.  It is unfortunate that there hasn’t been portrayal of a homosexual couple in a realistic sense – and when I say that, I mean showing affection, and showing what real couples go through.  And I think Andrew and I, Ryan Murphy and Ali Adler, always wanted to show that.  Because there are some great shows that have been groundbreaking with gay characters, but I’ve never really seen a realistic portrayal of what goes on behind closed doors with interesting topics.

MHTV:  Like Will on Will & Grace had to be timid at first about kissing.  Will you guys?

JB:  I put my tongue in his mouth, and I will continue to put my tongue in his mouth, and I don’t care.

MHTV:  Andrew, any concern about playing a gay character?

AR:  No.  I'm excited to play a gay character who was this fully developed and fleshed out.  I think I would be a fool to not jump at the chance.  And then particularly as a homosexual… it speaks a lot to Will & Grace and I just mentioned Jim J. Bullock to someone before –

JB:  Oh, Jim J. Bullock.  I’m a big fan!

AR:  All of that happened on the rocky path to where we are right now.  And I’m very fortunate that I get to benefit from all of that hard work, personally and professionally.  That I get to be out and not penalized in any way, and to be offered this role, is amazing.

The New Normal
Tuesdays at 9:30/8:30 Central
Beginning September 11
NBC

Annie Potts Talks Turkey about GCB and Chick-Fil-A

Annie Potts as Gigi Stopper in the woefully short-lived GCB.

By the time in 1986 when Annie Potts showed up on the small screen in the role for which she will always be best remembered, Designing Women's Mary Jo Shively, I'd already loved her for years.  Anyone who came of age in the '80s may remember Potts' brilliant best-friend role in 1986' Pretty in Pink, or her wacky Ghostbusters receptionist Janine in both the original 1984 film and its 1989 sequel.

After Designing Women ended in '93, Potts went on to many more TV roles; the Kentucky native was awfully convincing to me as the Italian-American chef Dana Palladino, when she replaced Susan Dey as the female lead in the final two seasons of CBS' underrated sitcom Love & War.  Later, Potts headlined Lifetime's 1998-2002 series Any Day Now, and has also had regular or recurring roles on Huff, Joan of Arcadia, Men in Trees and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

But of all Potts' roles, it was GCB about which I was most excited in recent years, bringing her back to the Southern milieu in which we all know she particularly shines.  I was shocked in May when ABC announced the show's cancellation -- surely the network could have given this fun romp of a show more of a chance to grow.

With the at that point soon-to-be GCB star Annie Potts
at the TCA convention in Pasadena, CA
January 2012

This past January, as GCB was about to make its debut, I had met Potts at the Television Critics of America conference in Pasadena, and took the photo, at right; both of us were full of hope that GCB would be ABC's next big soapy hit.  Cut to last week, at the TCA Summer conference in Beverly Hills, when I again spoke with Potts at a luncheon given by the Hallmark Channel, where the actress will be appearing in the TV movie The Music Teacher later this year.  It's always a pleasure talking with her, because of the way she answers questions; she speaks slowly, every word clearly being carefully chosen.  And so when Annie Potts speculates about the reasons behind GCB's premature demise, and about being a Southerner in the age of Chick-Fil-A, I'm that much more excited to listen.  Our interview, below:

Must Hear TV:  There’s a campaign out there to save GCB, if you’ve seen it on Facebook and Twitter.  Do you think it’ll have any effect?

I know.  But I believe if it was going to have any effect, then it would have had an effect already, regrettably.  Really regrettably.  Ah, GCB, RIP!  Bummer.

MHTV:  What do you think happened?

I think a lot of different things.  I think our ratings could have been a little better.  But you know they hardly give anything a chance.  I think if they’d given us a little time, we could have done better.  I think in the end, there were some advertising problems, because big advertisers had had some complaints.  If they get 10 emails going, “We don’t think you should be advertising during that…”  People got all flustered about what they thought we were, without seeing what we were doing.

MHTV:  Where were these people when the novel Good Christian Bitches [on which the show was based] came out?  It had the word “Bitches” in the title, and GCB didn’t even have that.

Yes, but I think it was implied.   There are some who were associated with it who felt like if we’d just named it something else, like “Homemade Sin” or something, that people wouldn’t have gotten their feathers ruffled from the get-go.  And that maybe we could have [lasted.]

MHTV:  It’s a shame people could be so closed-minded.  Not even seeing a show, yet three initials gets them riled up.

We could have named it “WTF,” and really pissed people off!

MHTV:  I wonder if that would have pissed Christians off as much as the idea that they think they’re being made fun of, with “GCB.”

I don’t know.  My Christian friends welcomed it, because I think everybody likes to smoke out hypocrisy when they can.  It’s like, “Hello, do you see how you’re saying one thing and doing another?”  So I felt that there was a lot of support in the Christian community.  But it only takes a few.

If you haven't heard, Chick-fil-A has
long supported hate groups like
the National Organization for Marriage
which advocate against gay rights.
Please don't patronize Chick-fil-A!

MHTV:  Speaking of Christians and the South, we happen to be in this moment right now where there’s a culture war going on, and Chick-fil-A has gotten itself embroiled.  You’re a Southerner, and you have obviously worked with gay people in Hollywood.  Do you have an opinion about this controversy?

Yes, I know about it.  I think maybe the problem is people having opinions on it.  I think if whoever is the head of Chick-fil-A had not espoused a bigoted opinion – it’s like, what does anybody care who people love?  They should be more interested in that they love.  Isn’t that what everybody’s supposed to be doing, and not be judgmental about who?  But, see, I’m judging him saying that.

MHTV:   I’m judging him too.  Because even if he’s entitled to his opinion, he’s supporting suppression of my rights with money we might be spending on his chicken sandwiches.

Yes, well I won’t eat there.  That’s all.  I grew up in a little town, and if somebody did something you didn’t like, my daddy would just say “We don’t trade there anymore.”  And I’d say, “We’ve been going to that gas station for 15 years!”  And he’d say, “We don’t trade there anymore.”  So I would say to Chick-fil-A, if people want to change things, then you just say, “We don’t trade there anymore.”

Of course, with the power of the media now, that’s essentially the same thing kind of closed GCB down.  People saying, “We’re not going to trade there.  We’re not going to tune into that show.”  Well fine, you don’t tune into the show.  And just keep it to yourself.

MHTV:  I thought it was a loving portrayal of Texans.  Yes, it pointed out hypocrisy, but I think everybody knows that that’s an element of Texas and of Big Religion.   I didn’t think it made particular fun of them.

I don’t think so either.   I know that it was not the intent of our creator, and our writers, who were almost all Christian.  Church every Sunday Christians.

MHTV:  This means we have another opportunity to bring you back to network television.  Do you have anything in your sights?

I’m trying to develop something right now.  But that is a long row to hoe always.  I love doing series television.  I’m a real workhorse in that way.  I love the work.  The work is hard, and the hours are long, but it’s what I’ve done for most of my adult life, and that’s what I like to do.

MHTV:  TV more than film at this point?  There are so many films fans love you in, too.

I think there are more opportunities for me in television.  Most movies are made for 14-year-old boys.

MHTV:  You’d have to be the long-suffering mom in film at this point.

I am a long-suffering mother.  So I would be happy to play that role.  But I think the roles are just better, with a little more complexity, in TV.

MHTV:  What kind of character would you like to play next?  A Southern woman again, or do you want to mix it up?

I always like to mix it up.  Although I think on television, there is some evidence that the kind of closer you are to the character you’re playing, the more successful you are.  And playing Southerners is something I really like to do.  I know them well, and I like to do that because I feel like sometimes Southerners aren’t portrayed as if they are complex characters.  And I always beg to differ on that.  And also, when you are playing a Southerner, you can say the most awful things and get away with it!

MHTV:  As long as it’s followed with “Bless your heart,” right?

That’s right.  So there are benefits to that, especially on TV.

Where Will Who Do You Think You Are Go?

 This morning on Sirius XM OutQ radio's The Frank DeCaro Show, actor/author/producer Dan Bucatinsky appeared to promote his funny new book, Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?:  Confessions of a Gay Dad (Bucatinsky's answer, by the way:  no.  Especially if as said gay dad, you start coordinating outfits to your diaper bag.)

The multi-talented, multi-hyphenate Bucatinsky will be appearing tonight (Tuesday, June 12) at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood, to sign the book (and next Monday, June 18 at the B&N at The Grove in LA). In addition to juggling raising two kids, ages 7 and "4 3/4" with husband Don Roos, the author is about to be plenty busy:  late in this past season, he appeared in a recurring role on Shonda Rimes' Scandal, and he revealed on the air this morning that  he's about to join Rimes' original, flagship show, Grey's Anatomy, as a member of its writing staff.  Bucatinsky also continues to produce, along with Lisa Kudrow, Showtime's hit comedy series Web Therapy, which is about to debut its second season on July 2 with episodes featuring none other than Meryl Streep. (Season 1 will be released on DVD and Blu Ray next week.)

But the one thing I didn't expect to hear from the busy Bucatinsky on the show this morning was a piece of bad news:  his and Kudrow's beautifully produced celebrity genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are, will not be returning to NBC.  I don't remember hearing this at the upfront, where NBC did trumpet its moves of Whitney and Community to Friday nights, where the network (ill-advisedly) hopes to create a hip comedy block.  I had thought that, as in past years, WDYTYA might return to NBC's Friday night at midseason; however, Bucatinsky says this is not to be.

He is hopeful that the show may find a new home -- particularly because he says the WDYTYA staff is currently in the middle of researching some more fascinating celebrity stories.  If you've never caught the show, check it out here.  So many of the episodes contain fascinating historical tidbits and mini-mysteries -- I'd recommend last season's Rita Wilson episode for a beautiful combination of both.

Rally Around Cougar Town

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for an upcoming of CBS Watch Magazine, about the historic moment when, due to popular outcry, CBS' '80s cop show Cagney & Lacey was brought back from the dead.

Since then, only a select few shows have been saved by the fans; as Judah Friedlander's character Frank Rossitano once said in my favorite line from 30 Rock, "They sent peanuts to save Jericho, and they sent douchebags to save Entourage" (although I don't think in real life Entourage was ever in any danger.)

Now, in today's social media world, Cougar Town is taking the same approach -- but, brilliantly, they're doing it preemptively.  When the show didn't land a spot on ABC's schedule for this past fall, we Cougar Town fans were worried -- as was Abed on NBC's similarly endangered Community, who in a brilliant gag, had to console himself with YouTube episodes of the show's British inspiration "Cougarton Abbey."

But this winter, when ABC announced its spring schedule with Cougar Town STILL missing, that's when fans really got worried -- and the show's creator/executive producers Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel began a clever word-of-mouth campaign to keep their show alive.  As Lawrence notes in an email just this morning to TV critics, "Trying everything; we just all like our jobs too much."

Presumably at the show's expense, the producers have flown the CT actors to appear at episode screening parties in cities across the US, and plied fans with T-shirts -- and as Lawrence admits, to ABC's legal department's dismay, also free wine and the chance at a walk-on role.  In another ballsy move, they even held a cocktail party for the critics of the TCA last month, in the bar of the very hotel where ABC had presented its Cougar Town-less spring schedule just hours before.

Luckily, when the network's Work It bombed after two episodes (too many), it became clear that Cougar Town could inherit that half-hour time slot, and it was quickly announced that that was the plan.  So the show is now set to return on Tuesday, February 14 at 8:30 PM Eastern/Pacific.  I'm concerned that this fun, snarky show might have an incompatible lead-in in Tim Allen's new family sitcom Last Man Standing, but I'm not going to quibble -- I'm just glad that Cougar Town season 3 is about to begin.  (And as Lawrence notes in his email, at least Fox was kind enough to take the time slot competition Glee off the air for 7 weeks.)

Below, the season 3 highlight reel teasing great stuff to come on Cougar Town.  I've seen several of the episodes, and can tell you that the show remains as sharp and funny as ever, with many romantic, beautiful moments masterfully mixed in.  Enjoy!
 
Bill Lawrence on WhoSay