‘Molly Dodd’: A Show That Really Delivers : Television: A pregnant lead is the latest development in the splendid ‘diary of a woman’ on Lifetime Cable.

There’s a wonderful sense of insecurity about “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and its title character, played by Blair Brown. It’s as if both the show itself and Molly are too sensitive and stylish for a crass medium like TV, but then repeatedly surprise you with a hidden indomitability that somehow enables them to survive for another shaky bout with life and love.

You could easily call it “The Unsinkable Molly Dodd,” considering the series’s real-life battle simply to exist. NBC foolishly canceled it in 1988 in what has turned out to be a creative Waterloo for the network, but the elegant half-hour comedy found a home on the Lifetime cable channel, where it is seen Fridays at 10 p.m. and repeated Saturdays at 1 p.m.

As for Molly, an attractive single woman in her late 30s who lives in New York City, she’s still muddling through. At the moment, she’s pregnant.

It is, in short, a swell time to touch base with “Molly Dodd” and find out why its admirers are addicted to it.

“It’s kind of a diary of a woman,” says Brown. “I think it would be interesting to track this character through her life.”

Which is why she was all for Molly getting pregnant, even though she’s not yet sure which of two beaus is the father--her current love interest, a black police detective (Richard Lawson), or her former boss (David Strathairn). Molly’s ex-husband, a jazz musician (William Converse-Roberts), remains a friend, but that’s all.

“I felt,” says Brown, “that particularly with Molly turning 40 years old this year, we had to deal with the baby issue one way or another. She either had to decide not to have a child, to have a child, to adopt a child, something. You couldn’t just let it slip by, because women don’t.

“I thought it would make the character much more interesting if she did have a child, and if she had a child pretty much on her own. Molly’s experience is always a solo one, and that’s what I like to explore.”

The almost telepathic relationship between “Molly Dodd” creator Jay Tarses and Brown provides an astonishing bonding of dialogue and performance. So genuine is Brown in the role that one wonders if Tarses simply created a fictional replica of his star.

Well, not exactly, he says, but if there is a main connection, “I think it’s in the spirit of the character of Molly Dodd and the spirit of Blair. I think they have similar essences.”

Is there any of himself in the character of Molly? “Blair maintains that there is,” says Tarses. “Sure, there’s a lot of me. I mean, she’s a woman that I like, a woman that I admire. If I were a woman, I think Molly Dodd is not far from the woman that I’d like to be. I’ve been married for 27 years to a woman who is not unlike Molly Dodd.”

e happy invention of “Molly Dodd,” however, might not still be with us today after NBC’s cancellation boner if an astute Lifetime executive, Pat Fili, senior vice president of programming and production, hadn’t made a quick decision to grab it. She had her own reasons.

“I felt,” she says, “that we had to make a decision to come out of the closet, so to speak, and say we were a women’s network. We try to have programming that doesn’t alienate anyone. But we had to make a statement and epitomize what we were by obtaining a significant program. I heard ‘Molly’ was canceled and thought, ‘What a perfect show to say what we mean when we say a women’s network.’ It was a message to advertisers.”

Tarses and Brown, meanwhile, simply resumed the ideas they had begun at NBC. When “Molly Dodd” was being created for NBC, recalls Brown, “Jay came to New York, and we sat a lot at the Empire Diner and talked about all the things we didn’t want Molly to be. We didn’t want her to have a big career. We didn’t want her to be a lot of perfect things that women were in TV. The fact that Molly’s not an achiever was Jay’s take on it. And then he went off and wrote her.”

But could a pregnancy cause problems with the audience, the way it did on “Moonlighting,” which folded in great part because of that plot turn? Tarses says that he doesn’t know how people will react to Molly having a baby but that “I think in ‘Molly Dodd,’ it enhances it all. I think it’s really in the spirit of what ‘Molly Dodd’s’ been all about ever since we started.”

And Brown--does she think that perhaps the birth of the baby might be a good place to end the series?

“No, I don’t,” she says. “I know Jay had a lot of worries about that initially. He just said, ‘Once you get a child, it’s a whole different show.’ And I said, ‘I know, but the thing is that we need a whole different show. I don’t know how long you can have her continuing to have a series of relationships with different men.’ I thought it would be more interesting to face new and different problems. I would like the show to go on.”

Well, it will be for at least the 13 new episodes that end July 6 and at least 13 more that will resume after a months-long layoff. After the cliffhanger pause, the series will finally disclose who the father is, after which Molly will give birth.

The cliffhanger could be a bit of a trial for viewers. Lifetime is planning to rerun the current 13 episodes right after they end. Then it’s going to carry “Molly Dodd” repeats five nights a week starting in September. Then, finally, it will launch the 13-episode conclusion of Molly’s pregnancy story in January--in short, after a six-month wait.

Tarses isn’t happy with the long pause in resolving the story: “I’m sorry to hear it.” At least one source thinks Lifetime may have set a January delivery date for the final 13 episodes for financial reasons, perhaps cash flow--so that it doesn’t have to pick up all the 26 shows in a single tax year. Surely a quicker, real-time resolution of Molly’s pregnancy is preferable--but her admirers are a hardy lot who have seen her and the series through tougher times.

The reruns, after all, will be there, and they are a joy individually. “The whole show’s a diary,” says Brown. And having a baby, adds Tarses, “opens up a lot of story-line possibilities. It just seemed like something that might have happened to somebody like Molly.”