Meet The Post-Ally Women

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Busy as she is strapping on those sandals, cocktailing to an imitation Bonnie Raitt and taking on clients who want to sue God, Ally McBeal probably doesn't have time to watch some of the new woman-themed TV programming that has arisen in her wake. And perhaps that's really best; for if she did have a look, Ally might see her dream of upmarket long-term love crumble like so much poorly packed wedding china. Indeed, what Ally would discover is that life with a good-looking professional and a Sub-Zero fridge doesn't add up to much, that happiness might be easier to come by if she returned to wherever she came from and made sure that Mom and Dad hadn't turned her girlhood room into an outpost for their StairMaster.

This lesson is delivered most pointedly in the new series Providence, which has become the TV season's unexpected hit and given NBC its highest ratings for a new drama since the unleashing of ER. Our heroine on Providence is a thirtysomething doctor who rids herself of her agent boyfriend and Malibu beach-house life to move home to the presumably less decadent shores of Rhode Island and work at a health clinic. Similarly, over on Lifetime, "the women's network," its three first-ever original programs--the drama Any Day Now and the comedies Maggie and Oh Baby--focus on women who renounce yuppie partnering fantasies for loftier pursuits. In fact, just like Providence, Any Day Now has as one of its protagonists a fortyish Washington refugee who gives up on power brokering and a noncommittal boyfriend to settle in her native town of Birmingham, Ala., and practice civil rights law.

Judging from the number of shoes on back order at Prada stores, it doesn't appear that real-life affluent women are doing all that much divesting. But here we have it anyway: a new, collective TV homage to lives of greater meaning and lower cell-phone bills. Perhaps CBS's soon-to-be-shelved sitcom Maggie Winters suffered because it didn't give its heroine a holier or more wholesome life-style alternative. Instead, it relocated a dumped Faith Ford from Chicago to her mother's house in Indiana for bonding and the occasional line dance.

All these programs seem born of an effort not only to create programming with a female point of view but also to attract women who may fall outside the demographic of single city girls age 25 and 26. This is a group perhaps too perkily and plentifully represented on late-'90s television in shows such as Ally McBeal, Suddenly Susan, Caroline in the City, Friends and so on. There's no doubt that Providence is reaching a broad audience. Since its Jan. 8 debut, and despite its generally doomed time slot (Fridays at 8 p.m. E.T.), Providence has been among the 15 highest-rated shows on network television, in some instances surpassing Ally McBeal, which draws more press than perhaps its ratings warrant. Watched in large majority by women over 35, Lifetime's original shows have all won more and more viewers since their fall premieres, and last month helped lead the 15-year-old cable channel to its highest ratings ever.

Given all the criticism that has been leveled at Ally McBeal (some of it by this writer) for her flighty self-involvement, it seems downright whiny to complain about the arrival of Providence's Sydney Hansen, whose androgynous name, like Murphy Brown's, is there to remind us that she is a serious working woman. After all, Sydney (Melina Kanakaredes) has abandoned a career as a Los Angeles plastic surgeon to become a family practitioner for people without means. Now, instead of ballooning the world's Pamela Andersons, she's treating homeless drug addicts, getting dogs for autistic children and helping care for her baby niece.

But Providence was apparently created in the hope that no one would ever describe its dramatic leanings as subtle or its characters as emotionally complex. The show exists primarily as a smug indictment of urbanity. Sydney doesn't reflect on her old life or ponder her decision; nor does she think much about the fact that she left her boyfriend because she found him in the shower with a man. Instead she swoons anew over a high school crush (a noble, working-class chauffeur) and dreams of herself in his varsity jacket. Sydney's dreams also take her into conversations with her dead mother. (Ever since Sisters, dramas aimed at women are required to include fantasy sequences.) Mom (Concetta Tomei) chain-smokes--so we know she's not a goody-goody--as she tries to turn Sydney more fun loving.

Sydney will always remain chaste, though. Providence is the brainchild of John Masius, also responsible for prime time's other paean to morality, Touched by an Angel. Masius envisions Sydney as a woman who doesn't become "loose." "I'm protective of her TV virginity," he says. Masius developed Providence when NBC came to him in 1997 in search of a family drama centered on a young woman. "I wanted to explore someone who got into something [medicine] for the right reasons, but whose life took a left turn," he explains. "I wanted to do a show around a career-oriented woman who as a result of her choices had given up family connections."

Any Day Now had a not quite so made-for-market genesis. Created by Nancy Miller, a veteran of such decidedly un-Lifetime fare as The Renegades (starring Patrick Swayze), the new series was originally conceived as a story about two little girls, one black, the other white, coming of age during the civil rights movement. Miller shopped her idea around Hollywood for eight years, but the networks always gave her the same response: the story was too controversial, and it wasn't all that marketable without a strong male voice. Any Day Now finally found a home at Lifetime last year when an executive there remembered reading the script during her days at CBS. Lifetime suggested setting the show in the past as well as the present, so Any Day Now flashes back and forth between a friendship born in Alabama during the '60s and its resurrection there in the '90s.

The relationship between Rene, who is black, and Mary Elizabeth (the adult women are played by Lorraine Toussaint and Annie Potts, respectively) isn't exploited as a vehicle for preachiness, and as a result it feels remarkably true. With her fast-track life abandoned, Rene comes back to Birmingham believably confused and a little lonely. Mary Elizabeth is a homemaker married to her childhood sweetheart, a construction worker. She has a son and a daughter. The show's strength lies in the way these two grownup women fight and play and envy each other's flawed lives in the manner that actual women do.

Lifetime's comedies, on the other hand, may not be among the best-written on TV, but they are certainly easier to sit through than back-to-back episodes of Jesse. Fortunately, both Maggie and Oh Baby work well enough as soap operas to make up for the fact that they feature unfunny therapy sessions, bad renditions of drunkenness and smart-aleck nannies.

Maggie, starring Anne Cusack, is one of the rare TV depictions of a woman feeling trapped in her marriage at mid-life. Forty years old and and a bit bored with her cardiologist husband of 20 years, she goes to veterinary school and soon after begins to fall for another guy. Whether or not she will pursue him forms the show's narrative arc. Oh Baby gives us Cynthia Stevenson as a woman in her late 30s who, in the third year of a relationship with a guy who won't leave his toothbrush at her house, realizes she would do better breaking things off and getting artificially inseminated. The series is based on the personal experience of its creator, Susan Beavers, who also tried to pitch her show to the networks without success: "They'd say it was too alienating to men, or they'd say, 'We already have a show about single moms,' and I'd answer, 'Well, that's like saying we have a show about people.'"

No matter how shlocky, programming aimed at conveying the full scope of womanhood may now have an easier time of it. NBC is trying to find a companion series to Providence that would follow it on Fridays at 9 p.m. Twentieth Century Fox is developing a Providence-type show for CBS about a mother and daughter based loosely on the life of star Amy Brenneman (formerly of NYPD Blue), whose mom is a judge.

And then there's the impending arrival of Oxygen, an all-new cable channel set to debut on Jan. 1, 2000, which will target women and children exclusively. Launched by former Nickelodeon president Geraldine Laybourne, it will rely heavily for its programming on producer Marcy Carsey, the force behind such hit shows as Roseanne and 3rd Rock from the Sun. "There is no diversity on network TV right now," says Carsey. "All the women are young and beautiful and work in the media. They don't seem to have any real problems." Except, of course, for the women on all the new shows she seems to be ignoring. At any rate, Oxygen plans to run female-oriented sitcoms, cartoons and even game shows. Presumably Calista Flockhart and Lea Thompson won't be slugging it out for the prize of a date with Judd Nelson.