(3 of 3)
The relationship between Rene, who is black, and Mary Elizabeth (the adult women are played by Lorraine Toussaint and Annie Potts, respectively) isn't exploited as a vehicle for preachiness, and as a result it feels remarkably true. With her fast-track life abandoned, Rene comes back to Birmingham believably confused and a little lonely. Mary Elizabeth is a homemaker married to her childhood sweetheart, a construction worker. She has a son and a daughter. The show's strength lies in the way these two grownup women fight and play and envy each other's flawed lives in the manner that actual women do.
Lifetime's comedies, on the other hand, may not be among the best-written on TV, but they are certainly easier to sit through than back-to-back episodes of Jesse. Fortunately, both Maggie and Oh Baby work well enough as soap operas to make up for the fact that they feature unfunny therapy sessions, bad renditions of drunkenness and smart-aleck nannies.
Maggie, starring Anne Cusack, is one of the rare TV depictions of a woman feeling trapped in her marriage at mid-life. Forty years old and and a bit bored with her cardiologist husband of 20 years, she goes to veterinary school and soon after begins to fall for another guy. Whether or not she will pursue him forms the show's narrative arc. Oh Baby gives us Cynthia Stevenson as a woman in her late 30s who, in the third year of a relationship with a guy who won't leave his toothbrush at her house, realizes she would do better breaking things off and getting artificially inseminated. The series is based on the personal experience of its creator, Susan Beavers, who also tried to pitch her show to the networks without success: "They'd say it was too alienating to men, or they'd say, 'We already have a show about single moms,' and I'd answer, 'Well, that's like saying we have a show about people.'"
No matter how shlocky, programming aimed at conveying the full scope of womanhood may now have an easier time of it. NBC is trying to find a companion series to Providence that would follow it on Fridays at 9 p.m. Twentieth Century Fox is developing a Providence-type show for CBS about a mother and daughter based loosely on the life of star Amy Brenneman (formerly of NYPD Blue), whose mom is a judge.
And then there's the impending arrival of Oxygen, an all-new cable channel set to debut on Jan. 1, 2000, which will target women and children exclusively. Launched by former Nickelodeon president Geraldine Laybourne, it will rely heavily for its programming on producer Marcy Carsey, the force behind such hit shows as Roseanne and 3rd Rock from the Sun. "There is no diversity on network TV right now," says Carsey. "All the women are young and beautiful and work in the media. They don't seem to have any real problems." Except, of course, for the women on all the new shows she seems to be ignoring. At any rate, Oxygen plans to run female-oriented sitcoms, cartoons and even game shows. Presumably Calista Flockhart and Lea Thompson won't be slugging it out for the prize of a date with Judd Nelson.