‘Any Day Now’ Can Hold Its Head High

One of television’s most likable, distinctive and ambitious drama series ends its four-season run on Lifetime on Sunday with an obligatory knotting-loose-ends finale that mingles schmaltz with a sense of humor.

Life gets rather ugly at times, but at least happy endings are still possible on TV.

This double-sized farewell is hardly the best of “Any Day Now,” whose best soared. It made intelligence its signature while confronting with heart and passion a multitude of hot-button racial issues--from the N-word to black discrimination based on skin tone--that other entertainment series wouldn’t have thought of touching.

“Any Day Now” had many compelling stories to tell. While frequently disagreeing, its Birmingham, Ala., protagonists--African American Rene Jackson (Lorraine Toussaint) and white Mary Elizabeth (M.E.) O’Brien (Annie Potts)--had a 30-year-friendship made in racial-harmony heaven. Their own personal histories in the South intersected the nation’s past and present, their bumps in the road becoming a metaphor for the tumorous relations between many blacks and whites that continue as America makes its way into the 21st century.

On Sunday, some bumps get smoothed out.

It’s not only the dawn of an exciting new career for M.E., who seems destined finally for the intellectual challenges she deserves yet doesn’t get at home from her amiable but unremarkable lug of a husband, Collair (Chris Mulkey). In addition, she has one last crucial pearl of motherly wisdom to impart to her daughter, Kelly (Olivia Friedman).

And it’s not only a wedding day for Rene, an attorney who is set to marry Judge “Turk” Terhune (William Allen Young), if she can just find the time--and the cake.

There’s also one last soapbox to mount, in a controversy arising from the discovery of an old slave cemetery, over which one of Rene’s clients wants to build a shopping mall.

Should the U.S. pay African Americans reparations for slavery? Yes, demands Rene, who crusades for this forcefully before ultimately deciding that an apology for slavery would do nicely.

“The only way to stop the cycle of fear and shame,” she lectures a group of legislators, “is for all of us to stop pointing fingers at the other side and simply acknowledge the horrific genocide of life and rape of the human souls that has occurred.”

Preachy, but on the money.

In fact, reconciliation becomes the finale’s theme, whether it’s Kelly and her husband on the mend, or Rene’s and M.E.’s aging mothers finally reaching across the racial divide to end their acrimony.

This is one of those weekly hours that you tend to take for granted until it’s gone. As “Any Day Now” fades out, here’s saluting a series, created by Nancy Miller and Deborah Joy LeVine, that has always ridden the crest of high aspirations, and two fine actresses, in Potts and Toussaint, who deserved a pedestal of their own.

Even if those noodles who vote on the Emmys never got the message.

“Any Day Now” will be shown Sunday night at 9 on Lifetime. The network has rated it TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language).