An Uncommon Bond

Race relations have always been central to the Lifetime drama “Any Day Now,” which opens its second season Sunday. Yet the first new episode also sets in motion significant changes--not tinged by race--in the lives of M.E., the white suburban housewife played by Annie Potts, and Renee, the single, high-powered African American attorney portrayed by Lorraine Toussaint.

With Birmingham, Ala., as the backdrop, the story travels across M.E. and Renee’s lifelong friendship, shifting back and forth in time. Though experience and choice has taken them in different directions--professional vs. stay-at-home mom--this season the lines are blurring as M.E. heads back to work after 20 years and Renee finds herself longing for a child even at the expense of her career.

The black-and-white flashbacks to their childhood during the turbulent civil rights era--with Mae Middleton as the young M.E. and Shari Dyon Perry as Renee--provide fragments of memories that give a deeper context to their struggles today.

Sunday’s premiere finds Renee arguing a case dealing with the parental rights of a developmentally disabled white man, as M.E. becomes an intern on a Birmingham magazine. The memory counterpoint is a scene in M.E.’s living room when she as a youngster catches her mom, duster in hand, executing an arabesque. Only now, decades later, does M.E. learn that her mother dreamed of being a ballerina, as she tells M.E. to not let her dreams languish.

Potts’ feels a real kinship to M.E. Not only is she a married mother, the actress is also the same age as her character--46. Growing up in Kentucky, Potts witnessed first-hand the Jim Crow laws that separated whites and blacks.

“Racism has always bewildered me,” Potts says. “I never quite understood it.”

Her school, for example, was segregated until her seventh grade. Potts recalls her parents made a “big deal” about it when school integration arrived.

Potts sighs. “To tell you the truth, it never occurred to me that there was some kind of law or understanding that everything was kept separated,” she says. “I don’t know what I thought.”

Toussaint’s (“Law & Order”) experience was completely different. For the first 10 years of her life, the actress grew up on the island of Trinidad.

“It was a very racially diverse country,” she says. “My best friend was Indian and my other girlfriend was Chinese. We didn’t have a lot of Europeans in the country at the time. But what few that were there were the minority. I didn’t know about segregation growing up.”

But even in Trinidad, Toussaint still had a brush with racism when a white family with a young girl about her age moved across the street. “We were not allowed to play together,” says Toussaint. “I remember her looking so lonely . . . I could never understand why she couldn’t play with us. It seemed so sad.”

Even when she arrived in the United States and lived in the Bronx, Toussaint had no frame of reference of racism. “It wasn’t until my real late teens that I began to [understand racism],” she says. “I just assumed that people didn’t like me because they didn’t like me. It had nothing to do with color because I had no frame of reference for that kind of discrimination. It took me a very, very, very long time for that to be the first thing that comes to mind when I am snubbed or treated badly.”

Both Potts and Toussaint say they have received tremendous response from both white and African American viewers about the series. “There was one woman who said, ‘I watch it with my 14-year-old because I want her to see what life is really like,”’ says Toussaint. “Ultimately, those are the biggest compliments--anything that sort of makes it bigger than who I am.”

Potts admits, though, that “Any Day Now” could use a bigger audience. “We’re still struggling to be on the radar because it’s cable,” she says. Still, Potts adds, “I have had incredible feedback, and I think it’s doing something that no other show on network or cable is doing.”

Executive producer Nancy Miller initially spent eight years trying to sell the series to the networks before Lifetime finally decided to put it on the air. She and executive producer Gary A. Randall have even taken the show on the road to such cities as Seattle and Birmingham to gain exposure.

“The show accurately reflects the country we live in,” says Randall. “The fact that we live in a multicultural nation--we have got to learn to live together. We are one of the great social experiments of the world.”

Carole Black, president and CEO of Lifetime, says “Any Day Now” is ultimately about friendship. “This show is about the bond that exists between two women,” says Black, “and that really does transcend time, circumstance and race.”

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“Any Day Now” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. and repeats Saturdays at 11 p.m. on Lifetime. The network has rated it TV-14D (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with special advisories for suggestive dialogue).