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Brenneman's 'Amy' imitates family's life
USA TODAY - November 2, 1999
By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
HOLLYWOOD - Handicapping the new TV season, few saw breakout status for CBS' Judging Amy, which stars former NYPD Blue regular Amy Brenneman as a single mother who leaves New York City to
become a juvenile court judge in Hartford, Conn.
Yet it quickly became the No. 1 new drama, attracting 15.4 million viewers and placing second only to the NBC sitcom Stark Raving Mad, which is sandwiched between Frasier and ER. Overall, Amy is
No. 13 season to date.
"Nobody saw it coming," says Brenneman, who also serves as one of Amy's four executive producers. "But I'm glad it did."
The show is based on the experiences of Brenneman's mom, Frederica, a Hartford juvenile court judge. Tyne Daly (Cagney & Lacey) co-stars as Amy's social-worker mom, Maxine, with whom Amy and
6-year-old daughter Lauren (Karle Warren) share a home.
Interviewed over lunch in her trailer on the Paramount studios lot, where the show is produced, Brenneman says she knew when growing up that what her mother did was unusual.
"In juvenile court the judge is much more active because there's no jury," she says. "That seemed like a good lead character for a show. So I pitched it as someone who has a lot of
authority in her work and comes home and gets yelled at by her mom.
"How you're an adult in one scenario and a child in another, and with the addition of my (character's) child, it became all these questions about who has the authority."
Hartford native Brenneman, 35, is playing Amy as she recalls her mom during her younger years. Daly's Maxine is Frederica today.
Mom still serves as a juvenile court judge in Connecticut, as well as a consultant to her daughter's TV show. "She digs it," Brenneman says. "She's part of the team. But she doesn't
really have any objectivity. My father (Russell, an environmental lawyer) keeps calling it an 'insane homage' to my mom. But they're both very proud."
The show originally was titled Shades of Grey, and Brenneman was surprised to discover later that it had been renamed after her. "I was so embarrassed," she says. "It seemed so
totally narcissistic to do that. I am featured, but so are Tyne and others in the show." Still, Judging Amy beats other choices the title-naming company came up with: My Mom's a Judge and
Home in Hartford.
There have been comparisons of Amy to NBC's Providence, also about a grown-up, curly-haired professional daughter who returns home to live with a single parent, but Brenneman says she was working
on Amy a good six months before Providence premiered.
"What's infuriating is, why can't there be two shows about women?" she says. "There can be a bunch of shows about male cops, and nobody thinks twice about it."
For Brenneman, Amy is a TV comeback of sorts. On the first season and a half of Blue, she played Janice Licalsi, the tied-to-the-mob lover of David Caruso's John Kelly character. When that role
ended, she concentrated on film work, including the widely seen Casper and lesser-viewed titles such as Bye Bye, Love, Neil LaBute's controversial Your Friends & Neighbors and the recently
released The Suburbans. She also did four episodes of Frasier last season as Frasier's Jewish girlfriend.
And Amy almost didn't happen. The original script was written by former Chicago Hope executive producers John Tinker and Bill D'Elia, but CBS was unhappy with what they turned in and brought in
Barbara Hall, who had served as co-executive producer of I'll Fly Away.
"I had five days to get the script reworked," Hall says. "But I loved the idea, and as a single mother, a woman working in a male-dominated profession, I understood the subject
matter."
Marlee Matlin guest-stars on tonight's episode, in which Maxine is featured in a case involving a deaf child. We'll meet Amy's husband, from whom she is separated, for the first time on the
Thanksgiving episode, airing Nov. 23.
Unlike her character, Brenneman is happily married to director Brad Siberling, whom she met when he directed episodes of NYPD Blue. They have no children, but she says that building a family is
something they'd like to pursue in the near future. "Had the show not been picked up, we'd be working on that right now."
Brenneman is involved in casting and offering input on scripts. After this experience, "it's going to be hard to go back to being an actor for hire. It's not about control, but being part of
the group that has a say in how things are done."
Copyright © 1999 USA TODAY. All rights reserved.
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