And ‘Now,’ Something Different

Glenn Gordon Caron calls his new show, “Now and Again,” a “comedy-drama-romance-musical.” He has to call it something.

At CBS, however, those busy promotion executives who know about these things told him that this description was “insane” and “absurd,” so Caron was forced to remind them that in the pilot “there’s a guy singing ‘Close to You’ while another guy looks at his private parts. I think that, in and of itself, suggests that it’s not conventional.”

“Now and Again” certainly is not conventional, unless the story of an insurance executive (John Goodman) who is killed by a subway train, leaving behind a wife (Margaret Colin) and teenager (Heather Matarrazo), but whose brain, unbeknownst to them, is transferred into a bioengineered body (Eric Close) by a government scientist (Dennis Haysbert) can be called conventional.

Furthermore, Close’s character is endowed with superhuman capabilities and enjoined never to try to contact his family, on pain of death. But he does so anyway, and his wife, quite naturally, doesn’t know who he is.

There’s more, though Caron is careful not to say how much more. He’s not being coy. He’s protecting his show’s chief asset.

“One of the things I think is provocative about the show is that it doesn’t declare itself in a very easy way,” he says, sitting in a large, windowless office at Silvercup Studios in Queens, N.Y. “You don’t look at it and say, ‘I know exactly what this is, I know exactly what it wants to be, I know exactly where it’s going.’ ”

Not even the cast members know where it’s going, although they have an idea of what it is--and what it is not. It is not “The Six Million Dollar Man.” What it is, according to Colin, is the story of a man and a woman who love each other but are separated not only by the obvious things--she thinks her husband is dead--but by . . . age. Her age and his.

How old is her character?

“About this age,” says Colin, referring to herself.

And how old is that?

“You tell me,” she says.

Mid- to late 30s?

“OK,” she says, smiling. “Certainly older than Eric [who’s 26], for the purposes of the story. It’s certainly a market they want to hit, the woman who’s older with the younger man pursuing her. Because it happens the other way all the time. Why are we always looking at that combination? He’s a state-of-the-art guy, and instead of going for a state-of-the-art chick, he wants back where his heart is.”

Also standing between Close and Colin is Haysbert, who views Close as an experiment and an expendable government operative. At the end of one recent episode, for example, Haysbert has him delivering extortion money to an elderly Asian man who’s threatening New York City with hemorrhage-inducing chicken eggs.

Haysbert is not completely unfeeling, however. During the same episode, delighted by his protege, he serenades Close with “Fly Me to the Moon.” So there is a push and pull here, though Haysbert is careful to say that his character always draws the line. At the same time, it has to be said that all of this cloak-and-dagger stuff can hardly be taken seriously.

“I sort of dress the show up with enough of this other stuff that people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth,” Caron says, grinning. “I’m much more interested in people than in the business of being a superhero.”

Apparently, so are viewers. “Now and Again” has become one of the most promising new dramas of the season, averaging 11.1 million viewers, a sharp improvement over CBS’ results in the time period last year.

Caron has always been in the people business, with varying degrees of success. He is best known, of course, as the creator of “Moonlighting,” which put literacy on the airwaves during the 1980s and launched Bruce Willis’ career. Part of the show’s appeal was its idiosyncratic, handmade--rather than sitcom-machine-made--feel, though this effect was often achieved by Caron single-handedly writing and rewriting the scripts, which sometimes delayed production. He vows not to get stuck in the same killing routine again, though for now he’s putting in 18-hour days.

At least “Now and Again” promises to be relatively angst-free. Colin and Matarrazo, for example, who play a seamless mother-daughter duo on screen, seem to have an easy, bantering relationship off. (Colin to Matarrazo threateningly: “I’ll kiss you on the lips.” Matarrazo to Colin: “You should take an acting class.”)

“Moonlighting,” on the other hand, was a notoriously difficult set. Caron wasn’t even on the show during the last year and a half of its run, courtesy of conflicts with co-star Cybill Shepherd.

By the time Caron left “Moonlighting,” he’d already made the transition to movies, starting with the well-received “Clean and Sober,” which starred Michael Keaton. He followed that with “Wilder Napalm,” “Love Affair” (in which he was at loggerheads with star Warren Beatty) and “Picture Perfect,” all of them disappointments. He also endured his share of development hell, working on but ultimately not directing “The President Elopes” with Robert Redford (which became Rob Reiner’s “An American President”) and “Evita” with Madonna (eventually directed by Alan Parker).

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Needless to say, these experiences have colored Caron’s view of the two mediums. He’s one of the few people around who can speak authoritatively about both.

“Television is very much about getting it done,” he says. “There’s less time for contemplation, less time for notes and, interestingly, less time for group think. At a certain point, they have to let you go. So if television is about getting it done, motion pictures are about getting it started. So much energy goes into pulling together all the disparate elements, getting people excited and finally getting them to say, ‘Oh, all right, go ahead and make that movie.’

“Now,” he continues, “the quality on lots of levels can’t be the same because you can’t plow the same amount of time into it. But there’s a kind of freedom that comes from ‘I’ve got to have something this week.’ You get very in touch with certain parts of your creativity. And as long as you feel unrestrained and free to tap into that, you can have a ball. And that’s what I love about television.”

Caron says that his kids (he has three of them and lives with his wife in Connecticut) inspired him to create “Now and Again.” He noticed that they seemed to think that adults over 25 don’t experience “ardor” and “passion,” which Caron, who’s 45, says is simply not true. He considered doing a show about a middle-aged man but thought it would be too boring. Then he thought about making the man younger than the woman, and he immediately flashed on a childhood favorite of his, “Damn Yankees,” in which the middle-aged hero sells his soul to the Devil to gain youth and physical prowess, only to realize that all he really wants is his wife.

CBS President Les Moonves bought the idea and gave Caron a 13-episode tryout and a Friday-night time slot. Caron is not too keen about the period, which is rife with Viagra ads (the show’s demographics skew younger), but he’s not complaining. Nor does he see his return to television as some sort of comedown from the movie business.

“I have stories to tell, and I’m happy to tell them in this medium, I’d love to tell them in that medium, I’d love to go back and forth,” he says. “It would be picayune for me to say I need a bigger screen, a bigger budget. When it comes along--and I have every reason to believe it will--I look forward to that, but I’m enjoying what I’m doing now, too.”

* “Now and Again” is shown Fridays at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).