The series premiere of The Starter Wife is almost here. Debra Messing stars as the Starter Wife premiering October 10th on USA Network. Check out the interview with The Starter Wife Executive Producers/Screenwriters Josie McGibbon and Sara Parriott.
How will the timing and pace will change for the series as it moves from a miniseries to a regular series?
S. Parriott: We’re going to identify each other, we sound exactly alike, Josie and me. 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.
J. 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 10th episode the feeling that there’s far more to come and not just, gee, wasn’t that satisfying, we’ll never see it again.
Where will we find all our characters when the series starts up.
J. McGibbon: At the end of the miniseries, again, as Sara said, 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.
S. 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’s 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, but fortunately gave us his three spots he’s allowed, so we always want to keep him in the mix.
How did the show end up being filmed in Australia?
J. 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.
S. 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.
Are Molly’s experiences in the writers workshop based on anything that happened to you guys?
S. Parriott: Only that people are critical of our work sometimes.
J. McGibbon: I would say it’s the sort of thing, the sort of conversations we have amongst ourselves and as Sara says, with getting notes, etc. I think also there is an element of all the wish fulfillment of all the crushes one of us had on English teachers our whole lives.
S. Parriott: I also think that like being comedy writers, one of the scenes that we have with the writers group is where Molly is showing her children’s book and meanwhile all the serious writers have these deadly serious, heavy … As comedy writers, we always go, “But we’re going for the jokes.”
What are your thoughts on why ABC’s Cashmere Mafia failed, why The Starter Wife performs so well, especially considering that both shows seem to have a familiar target audience of women in a certain age bracket?
S. Parriott: I don’t know what all audiences like. Of course, we always will prefer our material over, we tried so hard to—we like to tell our story with humor as the emphasis and I don’t know whether that made ours more successful or not. It makes us personally something 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.
J. 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 saying if we get to come back next year we’d love to have her if she hasn’t found another show by then.
What do you think it takes for a TV show to win over and hold on to the attention of female viewers?
S. 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 if 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.
J. 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.
So in the beginning of the series, she 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, I’m not sure how she’s going—
J. McGibbon: No, that’s a good question because we had long talked 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, that 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 that 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.
When creating the miniseries how much thought was there placed in the possibility of it going to series later on?
S. 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 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.
Do you worry any about the possibility of disappointing fans after giving them a happy ending, that her life is sort of all turned upside down again—
J. 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.
Are we going to see Pappy?
J. 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.
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 make up 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?”
The press release mentioned a detective investigating suspicious events in Molly’s life. What can you tell us about that?
S. Parriott: It’s about new events and they surround Joan, but we don’t want to say much more than that. But it’s along Joan’s storyline, but, of course, her friends get involved with it. Is that not very satisfying?
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