Grrl TV - Shows with Women in Mind

§ Starter Wife Essentials

We’ve seen a bit from the previews where Molly (Debra Messing) will be starting out. Could you tell us a little bit about where we’ll find all of the characters when the show starts up?

JOSIE MCGIBBON: At the end of the miniseries, it was a happy ending of a movie as far as we were concerned. She had found new love, a promising new career and was getting her life … seemed to have all her ducks in a row. And, so, once we decided to go to series, we had to sort of collapse that lovely construct so that we would have fun with our character.

The relationship with Sam, the homeless man, has not worked out. The children’s book is a flop, and basically summer is over and it’s time to get on with her life and figure out all over again how to navigate being a divorced woman, a single mother, trying to find a way to support her daughter and herself, not just depending on her ex-husband and finding relationships again.

SARA PARRIOTT: Our character Rodney is still with us and part of the coven, and he also is single. But he develops a crush on a black action star that he’s doing his house for, and we track what happens with that during the season. Our character Joan, played by Judy Davis, is having marital troubles and also starts working at one of the, like, Promises type of rehab. So, we can have fun with that.

Fortunately, we do have Joe Mantegna for three guest starring spots; he went off and took a new show [CBS' Criminal Minds], but fortunately gave us his three spots he’s allowed. So, we always want to keep him in the mix.

A press release mentioned a detective investigating suspicious events in Molly’s life. Is that from things that happened in the miniseries or will it be about new events transpiring?

SARA PARRIOTT: It’s about new events, and they surround Joan. But we don’t want to say much more than that. It’s along Joan’s storyline, but, of course, her friends get involved with it.

You mentioned Joe Mantegna is only coming back for three episodes. I loved the fact that he attended a funeral dressed as a woman to see what his friends would do. Are you going to fit in any kind of quirky stuff like that for the limited time that you have him back?

SARA PARRIOTT: Yes, I would say nothing quite as outlandish. He’s not wearing heels. And, by the way, they gave him a bad back for a while. He hated his day in heels, and they were low. But we do have a fun sort of splashy, beautiful piece in the last episode that I won’t tell you about that he’s involved in. His behavior continues to be idiosyncratic, but he’s never in a dress again. We’ll try maybe next season again.

Are we going to see Pappy?

JOSIE MCGIBBON: We are. We’re going to see Pappy. He’s not played by an Australian. He’s played by Ronny Cox. Actually, since your blog has to do with women and girls, I’d just like to say in case no one asks specifically, we have an incredibly high population of women on our crew and half of our directors are women, and we’re really proud of that. I think it’s a cool thing.

In fact, people have come to our set and have been sort of surprised. Often you go to a set, even on a show about women, and the only women on the crew are makeup and hair. And we’ve got women in every department and quite a few of them. Often the men look around and go, “Huh, there aren’t as many of us.” And we say, “No, there aren’t. But it’s more fun, isn’t it?”

§ From Miniseries to Series

How will the timing and pace change for The Starter Wife as it moves from a miniseries to a regular series?

SARA PARRIOTT: We knew with the miniseries it was like a six-hour movie. So, it was very much serialized with a finite ending, leading up with a large arc that goes over that. We will have like a ten-episode arc, but within each episode we’ll have a story that’s complete, and it is paced up quite a bit. But it will still have the serialized aspect of it.

JOSIE MCGIBBON: This time we are hoping that it doesn’t end after one season, so we’ve been carefully preparing to have at the end of the tenth episode the feeling that there’s far more to come and not just, “Gee! Wasn’t that satisfying. We’ll never see it again.”

Do you worry any about the possibility of disappointing fans after giving them a happy ending [in the miniseries], that Molly’s life is sort of all turned upside down again?

JOSIE MCGIBBON: We had no choice. There’s no way there’s a story in Molly and Sam keeping house and her writing more children’s books. But, yes, I suppose that’s possible. I think they will quickly find delight in her romantic situations. We didn’t know it was coming, so we wouldn’t have probably sewn it up quite like that if we had known there was going to be a series coming. But all I can say is, as far as fans are concerned, I hope they look at the glass as half full because this wasn’t supposed to come back.

One of the things that was so wonderful for us when we were looking at the message boards on the Internet and everything, and people were saying, “Bring it back, bring it back, bring it back.” So, I hope if they’re disappointed that Sam’s gone, they’re at least grateful Debra’s back because that’s what matters.

When creating the miniseries, how much thought was placed in the possibility of it going to series later on?

SARA PARRIOTT: Not very much because Debra was— She had just come off of Will & Grace. She actually didn’t want to work for a while and [wanted to] take a break. But she got our script and really wanted to do it. But it was with a very firm saying and contractually, “I’m not ready to go back into a series.” So, that’s how we viewed it. But when it did so well and we got along so well and it was so fun, then all of a sudden the doors opened again.

§ The Whole Starter Wife Package

How about the wardrobing?

SARA PARRIOTT: Wardrobe is very important, and we have a fabulous costume designer [Agata Maskiewics]. We can never pronounce her last name. We’re sorry. She’s Polish and wonderful. But that was something that we’re very aware of that we like to watch pretty clothing that we can’t afford.

JOSIE MCGIBBON: Sara and I are very amused when we’re approving wardrobe and watching it in the scenes where Debra looks ready for a premiere when she’s going to talk to someone in his office where we would be wearing jeans. It’s a wonderful heightened reality. The truth is some people in Hollywood and at these private schools really do dress that way, but it’s just having fun with it.

In the beginning of the series, Molly was dressed in Chanel and Prada; she actually mentions those labels by name in the first ten minutes of the miniseries. So, now that she doesn’t have access to such a huge budget—

JOSIE MCGIBBON: We had long talk about this because first of all, she’s not dead broke. But secondly, we all reasoned no one stole her closet, so she gets to have all her things. What we wanted, though, to reflect Molly’s new sort of breaking out of just the mold, is that she mixes and matches more and that there can be, then, the Chanel top with the pants from Barneys or whatever.

We can have fun with accessories and styles like that and make her look very individual and fashion forward. And, of course, we cheat because, of course, she’s wearing things that are new. But we decided it isn’t as though she had to sell all her clothes and wear our clothes.

She’s in jeans more, but all the tops are just beautiful, and she looks great in clothing. I think she looks really fantastic this year. It’s really nice in choosing colors that are beautiful with her, and that was really fun for us to choose the paint on the walls of her house that goes with her coloring and the clothing. It’s really quite gorgeous, but it is a little more bohemian. And when she’s with her daughter, she’s more like a mom, but still the tops are nice and what I would wear.

How is the music chosen? Is it going to be a character? Is it going to be not really a big focus?

JOSIE MCGIBBON: Most of our music is scored. Unlike a lot of shows that rely quite a bit on current songs and stuff like that, that’s the exception for us. We have whole episodes without any real current songs. It’s not as strong as a character, other than the fact that we have wonderful composers whom we adore. But it’s not like the shows where that’s the song you’re hearing on the radio or about to.

How did the show end up being filmed in Australia?

JOSIE MCGIBBON: That was purely a financial decision and one that our industry might want to take a closer look at so we can keep productions in the United States. There were great, great tax incentives by going to Australia. Pure and simple, we could not afford to make it in the United States.

That, however, needed to change when we went to series, and we had to figure out a model, a financial model, to make it feasible here because once it was going to be months and months of work every year, we weren’t all really packing up and moving to Australia. We had a great time. It was fabulous. It’s a wonderful place to work, and Australians are wonderful people. It was really great.

SARA PARRIOTT: And we were also shooting from fall into winter, and it was summer. So, it was a glorious experience. We just had to get used to the sun rising over the Pacific instead of setting.

§ The Starter Wife and Grrl TV

You both were consulting producers for ABC’s Cashmere Mafia last season, which was canceled after only one strike-shortened run. What are your thoughts on why that series failed and why The Starter Wife performed so well, especially considering that both shows seem to have a similar target audience of women in a certain age bracket?

SARA PARRIOTT: I don’t know what all audiences like. Of course, we always will prefer our material over— We like to tell our story with humor as the emphasis, and I don’t know whether that made ours more successful or not. We prefer to see our foibles presented in a more humorous manner. We tried very carefully in ours to weave the stories of our characters together, so their lives interact a lot more and their stories run into each other.

And in Cashmere Mafia, as many very successful shows do, they keep the characters’ stories very separate. And I don’t know whether that was the reason of failure or not, failure on either one of our parts. But goals that we have that we find successful are weaving the stories and really trying to tell our stories with humor.

JOSIE MCGIBBON: Of course, ironically, we lost Miranda Otto to Cashmere Mafia because when we made our show a miniseries, we did not have options on all of our actors because we weren’t intending, and Debra didn’t want to be, tied down to another series. When USA decided they wanted to continue with the series and Debra and Sara and I decided we did, too, then we went screening around and Miranda was otherwise occupied. And we’ve talked to her since and said if we get to come back next year, we’d love to have her if she hasn’t found another show by then.

There are a lot of popular, entertaining shows on television these days starring women that span genres and successfully cater to a female audience, ranging from Jennifer Love Hewitt’s paranormal series Ghost Whisperer to the Kathryn Morris crime procedural Cold Case to Tia Mowry’s sitcom The Game to this dramedy The Starter Wife, of course. What do you think it takes for a TV show to win over and hold on to the attention of female viewers?

SARA PARRIOTT: For us, we feel like no matter what sort of milieu you set them in, the women have to identify with the stories that you’re telling. With our character Molly, even though she’s in this very fun world to see — the very wealthy, Hollywood, wild story thing — her story about herself is basically one of a single mother who is struggling to find her own identity and raising a child with an ex and all these things that many, many women do. So we feel that no matter where it is, women really have to identify with who they’re watching.

JOSIE MCGIBBON: Also, women care about relationships with their friends, with their children, with their parents, with, of course, significant others or boyfriends or whatever. So, I think that especially in shows that are dealing with a strong professional theme, if it’s a doctor show or on Cashmere Mafia, all the women were very successful, etc. And on our show, Molly is still trying to figure out how to succeed professionally. But we do so deeply care about the relationships more than getting the corner office at the end of the day.