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The Corbett replacement for the husband, Steven Eckholdt (who played the part in the original pilot), even has a new name, Thomas instead of Ian. Vardalos has also changed her character's name from Toula to Nia, partly to help brand herself but also to update the character to the calmer, more mature person she has become. "Toula was a little more repressed," she says. "Toula worked in my shier stage of life. But Nia is who I am. Toula was sweet and wry. Nia is wry, sweet and smart-alecky." (After you pass $200 million, no one stops you from talking about yourself in the third person.)
Vardalos, who is used to creating all her own material, is going over every detail, from giving editing notes to the writing staff to approving opening titles. She is also promoting the film's DVD release and is scheduled to go into production on the second film she has written, Connie and Carla Do L.A., a buddy film with Toni Collette about two friends who witness a mob crime.
So Vardalos has been frantic, on set until 11 every night, she says, trying to make the scripts less sitcomish. "Our mandate in the writers' room is small stories," she says, forcing the writers to avoid the conflicts that organically come from the cultural dissonance she wrote into the film. "What I want is no jokes. I don't want lines like 'Good morning, honey.' 'Not in that shirt it's not!'" The show, however, is still very much a sitcom, with a lot of jokes. At a rehearsal for an upcoming episode, Andrea Martin as Aunt Voula walks in on Nia and her husband kissing in the kitchen and says, "Oh, I'm sorry. You're having sex. I'll come back in four minutes." Another scene, which disses Voula's baklava, has Nia calling it "mocklava." Solid jokes, but jokes nonetheless.
What Vardalos probably means by "no jokes" is none of the insult comedy that sitcoms often fall back on. Making fun of someone's baklava may be cruel inside the Greek community, but it's not one of the cutting, hate-tinged riffs so many sitcom characters display. "The challenge is being funny without being cheap," she says. "We all genuinely like each other and don't want to be funny at each other's expense." It's difficult not to rely on sitcom conventions when CBS pushed the premiere date forward a few weeks to get the show out in time for sweeps. As of Friday, Monday's episode still wasn't finished. But the scenes we saw were those of a show that had set its goal of one day becoming Everybody Loves Raymond. And Vardalos' plan to make the family less Greek seemed to fall away once she realized that thick Greek accents are funny.