Messing Around Again 

If Debra Messing isn’t already asking herself the following question, others might be for her: How in the world do you bounce back into television after the series you previously starred in redefined how gays were portrayed on television and became one of the hottest sitcoms of the decade? With a little will and a hell of a lot grace, perhaps.

No doubt Messing, who nabbed an Emmy for her role as Grace Adler on NBC’s Will & Grace, is up the challenge with The Starter Wife. The new show unspools tonight on USA Network.

Based on last summer’s popular miniseries, it marks Messing’s official return to weekly television. She reprises her role as Molly Kagan, the tossed-aside wife of a nefarious Hollywood titan. As Molly struggles to redefine herself as a budding writer and suddenly single mom, she leans on best friend Rodney, once again played by Chris Diamantopoulos (He’s the straight-hunk-playing-gay to watch out for this fall).

Judy Davis is also back -- she nabbed an Emmy for her role as boozing Joan in the miniseries.

Meanwhile, Messing says there’s plenty to adore in Molly, an endearing, looking-for-a-twist-of-fate character everybody can relate to. Truth be told, if there’s anybody who can win people over --again -- it’s Messing. Likened to Lucille Ball when Will & Grace premiered a decade ago, she has managed to emerge as a latter-day Carol Burnett (for the physical comedy) by way of Mary Tyler Moore (a good girl looking to create more good) with traces of Penny Marshall (stellar comedic timing à la The Women).

Advocate.com:Molly is a great character. So how choosy were you after Will & Grace ended and why did you land on this character?
Debra Messing: I told everybody in my life that I wasn’t going to look at a script for six months after Will & Grace because I needed to mourn and let it go, give it the time it was due. And then my agent, three months into that, handed me six hours of scripts for [The Starter Wife] miniseries. I couldn’t deny the writing. For me, it’s always the writing. I related to Molly. Obviously she was very very far away from Grace, which was interesting to me.

But she’s funny too.
I loved that the humor was satirical in regard to how Hollywood is revealed -- less sophisticated and deep values. There was something incredibly traumatic about the crisis Molly was going through -- being stripped of her identity, being stripped of an entire community, and having to start all over again. It didn’t occur to me until halfway through the [miniseries] shoot in Australia that, in a way, I was going through a similar type of milestone with the end of Will & Grace. Molly had a 10-year marriage; I had eight years on Will & Grace, and even though we chose to end Will & Grace, it was in my eyes a very traumatic ending, and my identity was very much tied up in that show and that role.

So what really stands out for you in that process of decompressing, of letting go of Will & Grace?
Oh, boy! I think it was actually ... me just getting in touch with my creative hunger. I felt creatively that we had done everything that we could possibly do on Will & Grace, and we were very proud of it. But we were starting to repeat, so I wasn’t feeling inspired or challenged. I was going elsewhere and doing movies on the side. Then, when I had time to ask, "OK, what muscles do I want to flex?" suddenly I was paralyzed with the freedom to choose ... because I wasn’t really in tune with any of those feelings. Up until that point, I wasn’t really able to indulge them. I realized that, for me, I needed to go away. I went to a little cabin with my family in Cape Cod, where it was completely quiet. There was no TV, no cell phones. It was in the middle of the woods on a lake, and after spending a significant amount of time there, the little voice inside of me began to speak again on what I was excited about, about what I was looking to do down the road, which at the time was doing another play.

You gave yourself space. That’s good.
Yeah, well, because there is so much chatter, so much noise. And I think with the BlackBerries and the iPhones, we communicate constantly and we are expected accomplish 10 times as much in a day than 10 years ago, and as a result there really is no breathing room or thinking room.