Interviews
The Starter Wife’s Josie McGibbon & Sara Parriott
USA Network’s Emmy-winning mini-series adaptation of Gigi Levangie Grazer’s book The Starter Wife
One of the biggest changes in moving from a mini-series format to a traditional series format is the pacing, something the producers had to consider as they prepared for the series.
“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,” said Parriott. Hopefully the tenth episode will not be the end, though.
“We’ve been carefully preparing to have at the end of the tenth episode the feeling that there’s far more to come and not just, gee, wasn’t that satisfying, we’ll never see it again,” said McGibbon.
Obviously the end of the mini-series, not knowing the story would be continued as a series, had a happy ending, so the challenge is to return to Molly’s world and create new stories to tell.
“At the end of the miniseries, [Molly] 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,” relates McGibbon. “The relationship with Sam, the homeless man, [ed note: played by Stephen Moyer who is now on HBO’s True Blood] 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.”
Although Sam and Cricket are not returning this season, Molly’s friends Rodney and Joan will both be back and dealing with their own issues. Rodney develops a crush on an action star, who happens to be straight, while Joan is having marital difficulties. She also starts working at a Promises-like rehab facility, which promises to provide some comedic moments.
Joe Mantegna is also back for a few episodes. When we saw him last season, he attended his own funeral wearing a dress and heels to see how people reacted to his death. While Lou won’t be doing anything quite that outlandish this season, Parriott does promise that the character will be the same Lou we came to know and love in the mini-series.
“We do have a fun sort of splashy, beautiful piece in the last episode that I won’t tell you about that Lou’s involved in. His behavior continues to be idiosyncratic, but he’s never in a dress again. We’ll try, maybe next season again.”
Moving on to more, well, girly things, how will Molly’s wardrobe stand up to her new status as divorcee? Will she go from Chanel and Prada to Old Navy and Target? These are questions the producers have thought about as we move into the next chapter of Molly’s life.
Parriott explains their thought process: “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.”
Molly will be sporting a more bohemian style this season, says McGibbon. “She’s in jeans more, but all the tops are just beautiful and [Debra] 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.”
Noting that NiceGirlsTV.com is targeted to women, McGibbon wanted to point out that theirs is a female-centric production. “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. In fact, 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?'”
We certainly think it sounds fun! Catch up with Debra Messing as The Starter Wife starts a new chapter on USA Network, premiering Friday, October 10 at 9/8c!
0 comments