Racism Confronted, ‘Any Day Now’

Best friends Mary Elizabeth “M.E.” Sims, who is white, and Rene Jackson, who is black, are having a heated debate about racism over lunch at a quiet restaurant in Birmingham, Ala.

The series is Lifetime’s rewarding but wildly fluctuating “Any Day Now.” And the argument erupts after M.E. (Annie Potts) requests more butter from a young African American woman wearing an outfit much like those worn by waitresses working there.

Uh oh. She’s no waitress.

“I guess we all look alike, don’t we?” the young woman snaps at M.E. before walking off angrily, her words chilling the air.

M.E. is stunned. Didn’t the woman realize M.E. had made an honest mistake? Didn’t M.E. try to apologize?

She gets no sympathy from Rene (Lorraine Toussaint), who insists her friend’s action was “kind of racist” because--get real, M.E.--she didn’t request butter from a similarly dressed white woman who also had been standing nearby.

“What a load of crap!” M.E. explodes.

What a load of something, anyway, and also an example of how perceptions of racism--valid or not--become a reality that must be addressed if society is to move forward.

What follows in Sunday’s back-to-back episodes of this second-season drama is an earnest attempt to explore contemporary U.S. race relations via the lives of these two women.

Can there be better metaphors than Rene, an urbane single lawyer, and M.E., an earthy wife, mother and wannabe writer, whose personal histories intersect a turbulent chapter in the history of this nation?

After all, they began their intimate friendship as kids in the early 1960s when Birmingham got famous in the civil rights struggle largely through the police dogs, cattle prods and fire hoses that notorious Sheriff “Bull” Connor turned on pro-integration marchers. And from the four little black girls--each could have been the young Rene--who died in the evil bombing of the city’s 16th Street Baptist Church.

How easy it is to like and respect “Any Day Now,” whose executive producers are Nancy Miller, Gary A. Randall and Sheldon Pinchuk. And such a distinctive series it is, especially when so much of prime time has been attacked for either omitting characters of color or deploying them on the screen merely as eye-catching wallpaper.

“Any Day Now” is the only series in prime time that pivots on an interracial relationship. And except for ABC’s “NYPD Blue,” it’s the only one that has consistently raked the raw-and-oozing sores of racism in the U.S., in part by mingling the present with flashbacks of Rene and M.E. as young girls (Shari Dyon Perry and Mae Middleton, respectively) in an epicenter of antiblack hatred and violence.

These bracing dramatic footnotes always ring chillingly true. And no softening euphemisms here, either. Rarely has the “N” word been spewed on TV by bigoted clods as frequently or as menacingly as in Sunday’s “Any Day Now.”

Meanwhile, M.E.’s decision to write about the lingering ache of racism for a local publication forces her to confront her own family’s demons, including her parents’ acquiescence to her Uncle Jimmy’s white-power madness and penchant for Nazis, the Klan and flaming crosses. And Rene, after making excuses, ultimately acknowledges the reverse racism of that nasty third-year law student whom M.E. innocently offends at the restaurant. This hostile young woman carries a brick on her shoulder instead of a mere chip.

Stop blaming “the white man” for everything, Rene wisely lobbies her later with no visible success. “You have to free your mind, because if you don’t, the hate will destroy you.”

A brawny concept. Yet . . .

If only execution here matched ambition, for “Any Day Now” remains, for all its good intentions, one of those “A for effort, but . . .” series that invariably falls short of the hopes they raise.

It’s not acting that stunts this pair of episodes. As always, Potts and Toussaint are first-rate, both together and separately. The usually mellow M.E.’s seething response to her predatory Uncle Jimmy (Michael Pavone), whom she hasn’t seen in 20 years, is strikingly on point, for example. And Rene is electrifying in a defining courtroom scene that puts racism on trial.

It’s just that trial segment, though, that epitomizes how “Any Day Now” fails on a script level, in this case by giving Rene the vast courtroom latitude she needs--but would never receive from a judge with a law degree--to put in orbit her climactic lecture to a witness and jury that registers an easy 8.0 on the Richter scale.

Jolted into action by that wake-up call in the restaurant, moreover, M.E. goes cosmic herself with her groundbreaking print piece on “the conflict between the races (and) how we don’t understand each other.” Which, being a fast learner, she swiftly researches and completes in a couple of days.

Hello! Is this Birmingham or Pluto? M.E. has lived her entire life here, has schmoozed with Rene nonstop since her friend’s return from lawyering in Washington, D.C., and this lightbulb is just now clicking on?

Contrived epiphanies just keep coming, for each time Rene seeks to enlighten M.E. about white racism, the script instantly orders up an incident on cue as an illustration, a device that trivializes her message.

The show’s biggest, harshest beam lands on that fat target Uncle Jimmy. If only racism were always as obvious as this dangerously narrow-minded yutz and the torched crosses he represents. “Any Day Now” touches too briefly on the other racism, the more subtle, spider web of everyday bigotry that is invisible to M.E., but that Rene says her black “radar” picks up.

“In this country, it’s always about color,” Rene says. “And it’s not just here in the South either.” You may not believe it or see it. But Rene, as a black woman, does, and that’s the reality “Any Day Now” asks Americans to confront.

Viewers get another shot at doing that in the program that follows, “I’m Not a Racist But . . . Small Steps Toward Healing the Hate,” anchored by Cokie Roberts and Deborah Roberts. A town-hall telecast produced for Lifetime by ABC News, it has all the earmarks, on paper, of those rhetoric-driven hours of hot bluster that are much less valuable than they are pretentious.

* “Any Day Now” will be shown at 8 p.m. Sunday on Lifetime. The network has rated it TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with a special advisory for coarse language). “I’m Not a Racist But . . . Small Steps Toward Healing the Hate” follows at 10 p.m.