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Going home to mother ... Amy continues the trend
Winnipeg Sun - September 18, 1999
By PAT ST. GERMAIN
It isn't divine Providence that sends Amy Brenneman's title character home to mother in her new CBS drama Judging Amy.
But comparisons with NBC's mid-season success story are unavoidable in the opener on Ch. 4 Sunday at 7 p.m. (a second episode airs in the series' regular timeslot Tuesday at 9 p.m.).
Like Providence's beautiful, luxuriantly maned plastic surgeon, Judging Amy's beautiful, luxuriously maned corporate lawyer Amy Gray (Brenneman) leaves a soured relationship, moves back into her
childhood abode and takes a more philanthropic job in her picturesque hometown.
Except in this case, the fledgling Hartford, Conn., family court judge arrives with a precocious six-year-old daughter in tow, and her meddlesome cigarette-smoking mom Maxine (Tyne Daly) is,
thankfully, very much alive.
Amy is loosely based on Brenneman's real-life mother, a superior court judge who graduated with the first class of women at Harvard Law School and was the second woman appointed to the bench in
the state of Connecticut.
But while Brenneman (NYPD Blue, Frasier), also a Harvard grad, competently inhabits her mother's career on the show, Amy Gray is firmly entrenched in the role of child to Daly's Maxine at home.
A retired social worker, Maxine was a family-court pioneer when the first child abuse laws were being written in the '60s and she's not shy about sharing her hard-earned wisdom with the new kid on
the bench.
"In the imaginary dynamic though, the daughter has gone further than the mother did in her career," Daly says.
"Which is another interesting thing -- the trailblazer who dug all the post holes and someone else who got to get her life by telegram. So, there's an element of being very proud of the kid
and being very jealous, which I think operates deliciously."
Daly (Cagney & Lacey) operates deliciously herself as the widowed Gray family matriarch, dispensing unwanted advice to Amy and pushing Amy's soulful brother Vincent (Dan Futterman), a
frustrated writer who runs a dog-grooming business, to get a real job.
Successful son Peter (Marcus Giamatti) and his Stepford wife Gillian (Jessica Tuck), on the other hand, are treated with offhand disdain, as when Maxine asks during dinner, "So, how's the in
vitro going Gillian? Did it take this time?"
Daly says she embraces Maxine's flaws. And although she's the cast veteran, with four Emmy Awards for Cagney & Lacey, along with a Tony Award for a Broadway turn in Gypsy, she doesn't see her
supporting role as beneath her stature.
"There's an element of relief to not be carrying the show or having those kind of headaches, which I leave to younger and smarter people," she says.
"The reason to have children at all is that they're better than we are. They get there quicker, they're smarter and faster and taller and funnier ... and as far as I'm concerned, I'm not a
supporting actor -- and never will be."
Copyright © 1999 Winnipeg Sun. All rights reserved.
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