Fran Drescher based her new sitcom about dating a younger man on her own relationship
Saturday, April 2, 2005
By Tim Clodfelter
JOURNAL REPORTER
LOS ANGELES
Six years after The Nanny drew to a close, Fran Drescher is back with a new sitcom.
In Living With Fran (8:30 p.m. Friday on the WB Network), the 47-year-old Drescher plays a divorcee who falls in love with a younger man.
The premise is inspired in part by Drescher's real-life four-year relationship with a man 16 years her junior. But in the sitcom version, the relationship is further complicated by the fact that her character has a son almost the same age as her new boyfriend.
"I wasn't even sure that I wanted to do another television series," Drescher said.
But, she added, "There's something very empowering about a woman who can earn her own living and doesn't need a man to be a provider. So then she looks for different things that a man would contribute in her life and complement her life in different ways."
She thought that the idea of a sitcom about a woman dating a younger man seemed promising, and she started developing it into a potential series. At the same time, actor and producer Jamie Kennedy (The Jamie Kennedy Experiment) was, coincidentally, working on a show with nearly the same premise. His idea was based on a friend who, at 23, had dated a 45-year-old lawyer with a college-aged son.
Drescher and Kennedy joined forces.
"He had the hook of having kids involved, which my idea didn't have because I don't have kids, and I was basing it off my story," Drescher said.
In the series, Drescher plays Fran Reeves, who has recently begun a romance with a hunky contractor in his mid-20s, Riley (Ryan McPartlin of Passions). When Fran's neurotic 21-year old son, Josh (Ben Feldman), flunks out of medical school and comes back home, he is horrified to find his mother dating someone just a few years older than he is. Fran's 15-year-old daughter, Allison (Misti Traya), knows all about the romance and doesn't mind, but Josh tries to find a way to persuade his mother to "act her age."
Charles Schaughnessy - Drescher's co-star on The Nanny - will have a guest role as her character's ex-husband in a forthcoming episode of the new show. "It seemed, like, kind of natural," Drescher said of that casting choice. "And I think it is a little nod to the home viewers that were big Nanny fans who will hopefully follow me over to the WB for Living With Fran. And he's great and, you know, I missed him and wanted a chance to work with him again."
Episodes of Living With Fran based on specific experiences from Drescher's relationship include one in which Riley's parents come for a visit and Fran finds herself on the receiving end of scathing comments from his mother (Marilu Henner).
In real life, Drescher said, her boyfriend's father and stepmother came for a visit.
"It turned out she was two years younger than me," Drescher said. "I, like, ripped through my closet looking for anything tie-dyed, so I could kind of look, you know, youthful."
And in the course of the visit, Drescher said, her boyfriend's father cornered her in the pantry and asked, "What are you doing with him? You should be with me."
Another incident that will make it into an episode of the series involved Drescher's discovery that her boyfriend was secretly keeping an apartment on the side.
"He always wanted to in case we ever had a fight or something, that he would have a place to go," Drescher said. "And so we made a story about that.... Of course, in the series, eventually he gives up the apartment by the end of the episode because our love is true. In real life, he kept the apartment, and now he's back in it."