‘Molly Dodd’ Takes Her Cues From Life

Blair Brown pays the mortgage on her New York apartment, schedules baby sitters for her 5-year-old son and routinely catches the Red Eye to Los Angeles for work on her own TV show. At first glance, she is like one of those perfect women in the hair spray commercials who wows them all day at the office, then races home to whip up a spectacular gourmet meal for that special man, looking absolutely gorgeous, and remains irresistibly charming throughout the entire ordeal.

While Brown’s life appears, at least on the surface, to be the model of professional success and personal happiness, championing the image of the modern-day superwoman is definitely not what she aspires to do in her television series, “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” (which returns to NBC tonight at 9:30).

As created for Brown by Jay Tarses, the show’s writer, director and producer, Molly Dodd is a modern-day eccentric--a drifter, poet, daydreamer and failed jazz singer who tosses and turns alone each night in her New York apartment. She has Brown’s captivating smile, dark red hair, wind-chime voice and boundless television charisma but, probably unlike anyone else on episodic television blessed with such an embraceable face, Molly sometimes snaps at the people she cares about. While smart and funny, she is also a bit of a nut.

“When we started this,” Brown says, “all the women’s roles on television were about the good woman, who is always capable, always loving, always understanding. The good mother, fabulous wife and successful careerist. It was just like, ugghh, impossible, nauseating. Molly just has more edge and isn’t always the nicest guy in the world. And I think that’s real good and particularly interesting to see in a woman because traditionally men have been gruffer and that’s considered charming in a man. But in a woman, it’s just considered bitchy.”

In a television age dominated by women characters such as Meredith Baxter Birney’s “Mom” in “Family Ties” and Phylicia Rashad’s “Mom” in “The Cosby Show,” who have it all and love it, Molly celebrated her 35th birthday by confessing that she hadn’t arrived at the place in work, in love, in life that she had been trained to believe would always be hers.

Molly’s half-hour of life each week is filled with Angst. Over the course of the show’s first 13 episodes last summer, she suffered a rather unsettling nervous breakdown. She walked into her therapist’s office one day, cracking Freudian jokes with reckless abandon and walked out a psychological wreck, flipping out over the watermelon display in a corner grocery store.

Yet in spite of her sadness, the ex-husband who still haunts her daydreams and her rather imperfect work life, Molly perseveres, her spirit, curiosity and zest for life delightfully intact.

She is never one to wallow in misery and misfortune. In tonight’s first episode of the new season, Molly wonders how the burglars transport their stolen VCRs and Waterford crystal over, around and down Manhattan’s rooftops and fire escapes rather than dwelling on her girlfriend’s hysteria at being robbed.

Brown suggests that Molly, with all her flaws and failures, is as vital a role model for both women and men as the TV women who tell their audiences week after week that they can and should be smart, beautiful, successful at work and blissful at home.

“I think the notion of that sort of achievement is a bit of a bust,” Brown says. “It was a necessary step in helping women to evolve into being able to play different kinds of roles in this culture. But there’s every reason to champion this person as well--a person who has a very positive and good influence in the world. That’s what you want when you raise your children, whether they become president of Chase Manhattan Bank or end up just fixing cars.

“What I like about what this show communicates is that it’s the story of a very individual and eccentric person--like everybody is. But we live in a country that reinforces conformity all the time. And I like that this person, who is just out of step, survives and does fine and has a lot of heartbreak and keeps a hold of herself--keeps her sense of humor and a sense of perspective. I love that we’re talking about all that stuff rather than providing the handy 20-minute solutions to family crises that you see all the time.”

Tarses, who co-created the darkly sophisticated comedy “Buffalo Bill” several years ago, is renowned for ignoring the conventions of prime-time television, and his other current show, “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story,” also chronicles the ongoing, personal journey of an eccentric and not always likable main character. But immersed in the production of “Molly Dodd” like a “religious fanatic,” Tarses says that what makes this show special is Blair Brown.

“She nails this stuff,” he raves. “She makes it work all the time. She moves without the ball like a good basketball player. She’s listening, she’s thinking, she’s setting picks for you. And I think she has an incredible face. If you like her face, if you buy that face and you buy Blair Brown, then ‘Molly Dodd’ is going to knock your socks off.”

Brown says she initially chose acting by default after dropping out of college and deciding she didn’t want to get married. She went to acting school in Montreal and soon began performing in regional theaters around the United States and Canada. She has appeared in three features, “Altered States,” “A Flash of Green” and opposite John Belushi in “Continental Divide,” and a host of TV miniseries including “Kennedy,” “Eleanor and Franklin” and “Space.”

Though she once snubbed series television as a lower form in the acting hierarchy, she agreed to work with Tarses on a failed ABC pilot called “The Faculty” because she had been a fan of “Buffalo Bill.” When ABC passed on that typically dark Tarses comedy, NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff asked Tarses to create a show about a woman in her 30s living in New York, and Brown, for the first time, found herself with a steady television job.

Like Molly, the self-described “very responsible” Brown has a kind of rebellious free spirit and a mischievous glint in her blue eyes. She says that J.D. Salinger and Jimi Hendrix served as major influences for both herself and Molly during their impressionable youth, and that, in an effort to stay hip with the times, they both recently went out and bought the latest Sting tape.

Some of Molly’s edginess and bluntness with people have rubbed off on her during the past year, Brown says, but perhaps the funniest and most unsettling new phenomenon in Brown’s life is that both she and her son, who makes no secret that he’d prefer that his mother get out of show business and become a “quilt maker,” have come to think of Molly as someone who actually exists.

“Last summer, I went shopping and I said, ‘Oh, this would be good for Molly.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh great, maybe I should just call her up and ask her.’ I did start making these distinctions: This would be good for Molly and this would be good for Blair. And my son has started to do the same thing. Maybe he should see a psychiatrist.”

But her son’s juggling his mother’s various realities and the inconveniences of being a New York resident forced to shoot the life of a character who lives in New York out here in the San Fernando Valley aside, becoming Molly Dodd on the set everyday, Brown enthuses, is a dream come true.

“It’s the happiest job I ever had,” Brown says. “I could do this forever. It affords me all kinds of possibilities because we can just write fantasies or dream sequences. I get to dance. I get to sing. The nicest thing about this form is that we can do something very funny or very silly and the next minute do something that is really sort of gut wrenching. It’s truly exhilarating. IT’s like catching a wave and just going whooooshhh.”