The New Season: Holly Hunter, another TV star who doesn’t watch TV

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Like Glenn Close (‘Damages’) and other movie actors showing up on series television, Holly Hunter (‘The Piano,’ ‘Broadcast News’) admitted Sunday on a TCA panel that she never used to watch television at all until she got a series lead. Hunter stars in ‘Saving Grace,’ a TNT drama airing July 23, as a cynical Oklahoma City detective touched by a country angel named Earl.

‘I know I sound like a [expletive] snob,’ Hunter said. She started watching TV when Nancy Miller, the show’s executive producer, sent her DVDs to help hire a director. ‘It was a revelation to me,’ she said. ‘It was like, ‘Wow. The Shield.’’

‘It was so provocative and so personal. Television suddenly felt like a bunch of private lives instead of homogenized lives. That’s where I left TV.’

Television, of course, has offered older women careers much longer than they would have had in the youth-obsessed movies.

‘It probably is that cable has changed the landscape semi-permanently at least,’ she said. ‘It happens to be made for less money and risks can be greater, it adds up to people wanting to take chances....

‘A door has been opened. In the ‘70s, antiheroes were all over the place in cinema. Now it’s happening on television with women.’

-- Lynn Smith

(Photo: TNT)