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Fall shows prove older stars ripe for change
Miami Herald - August 18, 1999
By ELLEN GRAY
Knight Ridder News Services
You know there's something rotten in the state of California when TV actors who appear to be in their early 20s won't reveal their ages for fear of appearing too old for this year's bumper crop
of high school shows.
But even if the smell of Clearasil hangs heavy over this particular fall season, not all the women's roles are going to 22-year-olds who can play 16.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be two shows competing for the services of Dixie Carter.
Six years after the Designing Women star left series television, she found herself in May with an embarrassment of riches: Both the pilots she'd made had been picked up by CBS for its Monday night
schedule, and only one might get to keep her.
Carter, whose contracts commit her first to playing a down-and-dirty divorce lawyer on CBS' Family Law, may also retain at least a recurring role in CBS' Ladies Man, in which she was to portray a
glamorous grandmother who gives her grandchildren cell phones.
"I don't know what happened. I'm thrilled," Carter says of her predicament. "Doing two pilots is easy because everyone knows they won't both get picked up. And certainly if they get
picked up, they're not going to be on the same night. Everyone knows that. So here we are."
Carter's not the only woman of a certain age who's finding work in TV these days. Besides her Designing Women co-star Annie Potts, who began her second season in Lifetime's Any Day Now on Sunday,
Carter will share the tube this fall with:
Betty White. The Golden Girls star, whose first sitcom, Life with Elizabeth, aired during the 1953-54 season, plays the other grandmother in Ladies Man, one of the many women in the life of the
show's central character, Jimmy Stiles (Alfred Molina).
Florence Henderson. Three decades after she was a "Today Girl" on NBC's Today show, the Brady Bunch mom returns to the network's morning schedule, as one of three co-hosts on Later
Today.
Noting that she represents "the largest segment of the viewing public" -- older people -- Henderson declares: "We've got the money. We've got the time. We need a voice. I hope to be
that voice."
Sela Ward. The former Sisters bad girl, who recently disclosed her age -- 43 -- to a roomful of reporters -- landed a part in what could be the hottest TV romance since Dawson met Joey. ABC's Once
and Again stars Ward as a fortysomething divorcee with teenage children and Billy Campbell (The Rocketeer) as the guy who can't keep his hands off her.
Swoosie Kurtz. The oldest of the Sisters is back again, this time playing the boozy mother of an heiress in love with a building superintendent in CBS' Love & Money.
Rue McClanahan. Like her Golden Girls co-star, White, McClanahan's playing a grandmother. But as the only maternal presence on the WB's Safe Harbor, McClanahan's more Auntie Mame than Aunt Bee.
Tyne Daly. The Cagney & Lacey veteran won't be chasing bad guys in CBS' Judging Amy, but she's bound to get some mileage out of her role as the nicotine-addicted, social-worker mother of a
young family-court judge (Amy Brenneman).
Kathleen Quinlan. As the suddenly separated Lynn Holt, Quinlan's at the heart of Family Law, another series that examines the effects of divorce on a family. While not exactly one of the Golden
Girls, Quinlan, with an Oscar nomination for Apollo 13 and more than two decades of solid work to her credit, won't soon be mistaken for Ally McBeal, either.
Margaret Colin. The Foley Square veteran gets her own bittersweet romance in CBS' Now and Again, in which she plays a woman whose middle-aged husband's brain ends up in the body of a much younger
man (Eric Close) -- who can't stop thinking about her.
Reason for older roles
So how -- in a year in which we're told both the audience and the advertisers are demanding ever-younger actors -- do roles like these come to be written?
Now and Again creator Glenn Gordon Caron, whose last foray into series television was a little thing called Moonlighting, claims he got the idea for the series after watching Dawson's Creek with
his 14-year-old daughter.
"It was as if no one over the age of 26 experienced ardor or passion or experienced romantic love, that that really existed for people between the ages of 15 and 25. And after that, you
passed into this netherworld," he says. "And I thought, gee, it would be fun to do a show where people who are slightly older experienced those feelings. Because I am actually older than
26. And I'm a hopeless romantic."
After tossing around the idea of a show "about sort of middle-aged people," Caron finally decided it would be more interesting "if you took a fascinating woman of a certain age, and
next to her you put a man who is much, much younger."
Jokes Colin, expressing relief that for once it was her co-star, and not she, who would have to be a perfect physical specimen: "It's very nice to be the object of desire for the most
wonderful man in the world."
Rewarding reasons
Ward, whose own similarly named middle-aged romance is a little more rooted in reality, says one of things that excites her about Once and Again is that it's "celebrating age and life
experience and putting a slant on it that's positive and entertaining and interesting and dynamic and full of life."
The actress, who's working on a documentary for Lifetime on ageism and beauty, says her own personal standard is Susan Sarandon, an over-50 actress "who's just oozing sexuality and vibrancy
-- I don't know who'd kick her out of bed."
Ward's eyes flash when told of twentysomething actors who won't say how old they are.
"I'm sorry, this defies the laws of nature, OK? It's like the whole country's operating under the fear of going gray.
"And women especially live in fear and panic that someone, God forbid, will find out how old they are."
One actress who's not living in fear of going gray is Daly, who, more than a decade after Cagney & Lacey left the air, seems content with her Emmys and her Tony and willing to let the next
generation do the heavy lifting for a change.
"It feels absolutely age-appropriate to me" to be playing Brenneman's mother, Daly says firmly.
"There's an element of relief to not be carrying the show, or producing the show, or having those kind of headaches, which I leave to younger and smarter people."
Copyright © 1999 Miami Herald. All rights reserved.
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