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Given all the criticism that has been leveled at Ally McBeal (some of it by this writer) for her flighty self-involvement, it seems downright whiny to complain about the arrival of Providence's Sydney Hansen, whose androgynous name, like Murphy Brown's, is there to remind us that she is a serious working woman. After all, Sydney (Melina Kanakaredes) has abandoned a career as a Los Angeles plastic surgeon to become a family practitioner for people without means. Now, instead of ballooning the world's Pamela Andersons, she's treating homeless drug addicts, getting dogs for autistic children and helping care for her baby niece.
But Providence was apparently created in the hope that no one would ever describe its dramatic leanings as subtle or its characters as emotionally complex. The show exists primarily as a smug indictment of urbanity. Sydney doesn't reflect on her old life or ponder her decision; nor does she think much about the fact that she left her boyfriend because she found him in the shower with a man. Instead she swoons anew over a high school crush (a noble, working-class chauffeur) and dreams of herself in his varsity jacket. Sydney's dreams also take her into conversations with her dead mother. (Ever since Sisters, dramas aimed at women are required to include fantasy sequences.) Mom (Concetta Tomei) chain-smokes--so we know she's not a goody-goody--as she tries to turn Sydney more fun loving.
Sydney will always remain chaste, though. Providence is the brainchild of John Masius, also responsible for prime time's other paean to morality, Touched by an Angel. Masius envisions Sydney as a woman who doesn't become "loose." "I'm protective of her TV virginity," he says. Masius developed Providence when NBC came to him in 1997 in search of a family drama centered on a young woman. "I wanted to explore someone who got into something [medicine] for the right reasons, but whose life took a left turn," he explains. "I wanted to do a show around a career-oriented woman who as a result of her choices had given up family connections."
Any Day Now had a not quite so made-for-market genesis. Created by Nancy Miller, a veteran of such decidedly un-Lifetime fare as The Renegades (starring Patrick Swayze), the new series was originally conceived as a story about two little girls, one black, the other white, coming of age during the civil rights movement. Miller shopped her idea around Hollywood for eight years, but the networks always gave her the same response: the story was too controversial, and it wasn't all that marketable without a strong male voice. Any Day Now finally found a home at Lifetime last year when an executive there remembered reading the script during her days at CBS. Lifetime suggested setting the show in the past as well as the present, so Any Day Now flashes back and forth between a friendship born in Alabama during the '60s and its resurrection there in the '90s.