“The Seven-Script Itch”

The New York Times, June 1, 2003, Sunday

IMAGINE your favorite Hollywood marriages: Burton and Taylor, Gable and Lombard. They led alluring lives; their weddings, affairs and divorces were breathlessly covered by Photoplay. If they parented at all, they threw art-directed birthday parties with pony rides. The Showtime series ''Out of Order'' is not about this kind of Hollywood marriage.

Think instead of Tuesday soccer games, carpooling in your Mercedes convertible. Think of barbecues with sloshed producers, serving diet Slice and vodka around the Weber. This is contemporary Santa Monica, featuring a pair of yuppie co-writers, co-parents and, as we say in the current vernacular, co-dependents. He is Mark Colm, played by Eric Stoltz as a grown-up version of teenage girl candy. He's a frisky risky-business dad, who for inspiration plays air guitar in the massive writing office built with the profits from their hit ''The Bear Movie.'' She is Lorna Colm, played by Felicity Huffman, the other half of the writing team, and therefore half responsible for their oversized home. She can't wake up. The pot and the Scotch strewn around the house are her mess, the detritus of the night before. We see him cleaning it up as he prepares his son for school. Her issue is insomnia: tortured, impacted childhood demons that require her to use the pills, pot and booze to get through the night.

The setting is a coveted Mission-style home, shades drawn, morning chores piling up. The animals need to be fed; in fact, they tell us so directly, in one of the contrivances that clutter the first installment of the six-episode show, which begins tonight at 10. (Note to writers: We don't need to be hit over the head with all of these exhausting fantasy devices.) Morning brings no marital joy or writing or meetings for this formerly happy team. It seems that what we have here is a high-functioning Hollywood husband trying to wake up his high-maintenance wife.

Like so many Hollywood couples, these two get more interesting when they get out of town. Lorna, played with aching gusto by Ms. Huffman, goes home for Thanksgiving to take on her dreaded stepfather as her husband and mother look on. In a brutally written, staged and played prize fight, the stepfather tries to use Lorna's career success -- built from the very pain he caused -- to dismiss his early abuse. The scene's raw power excused all the false starts of ''Out of Order'': from this point on we are captured by the subtext of the marriage. The show's writers, Donna and Wayne Powers, themselves a married screenwriting couple, have shown the show's true strength: writing. They have uncovered the psychological underbelly of the Colms' partnership, and the series comes alive.

This scene, with her deeply felt angst and his inability to react, reveals what I suspected from the opening: she's the writer. But it was his ambition that made them screenwriters. The two are inextricably bound; he can't write without her, thus his anger at her block, and she couldn't have done it without him, thus her need for independence. Everywhere he goes he's complimented for work he secretly thinks is hers. No wonder he craves female attention. And that brings us to his affair. The one with the navel ring girl.

The series has moments that get uncomfortably close to the bone. But so far they're not the Hollywood scenes. These feature Peter Bogdanovich playing an easy parody of a Robert Evans-like producer in his Versailles-like home. The truth about Hollywood can be seen in Ms. Huffman's face, which shows the fissures of a hardworking marriage and the still nerve-racking existence of women in Hollywood's workaday world. It so often beats up the women, sometimes just because women are less used to getting beaten up.

No one wants to whine these days about the state of women in Hollywood -- particularly when women are running studios and earning gross points, etc. But pernicious traps remain. While the boys club never dies, the girls club turned out to be short lived: not much more than a luncheon once a year for $5,000 a table, and a generation of younger women sniping at their elders' heels. And even the most powerful find the unexpected glass ceiling rematerializing at times, seemingly out of nowhere.

And now ''Out of Order'' comes along with a devastating gender-bending twist: the woman can't pull off the parental role either. Lorna can't get to the soccer game. She's too burned out, boozed up, depressed. Big Hit = Big Mortgage = Big Nightmares. For every gain, it seems, a loss, ''Out of Order'' says. Yet the somehow always reliable dad shows himself to be, time and time again, the trustworthy party after all. That is, until his raging flirtation gets dangerous at an ecstasy party, at someone's giant house, with his wife and a bunch of other couples behaving as if all their parents are out of town. The lustful adulterers, Mark and his navel ring sweetie, almost do it, right in the pool and under the noses of everyone's watchful spouses. But not yet: thinking about it is still too much fun.
Like in Hollywood, sex in this show is extramarital, and when Mark and his sweetie finally go to bed, like in any good Showtime affair, the sex is hot. But like everything with Frisky Dad, it's of the teen variety: torrid and confused. When they realize what they have done, the adulterers hack out the issues of their guilt-ridden love affair at a sprouts shop over a smoothie in midday. (I would be embarrassed to show this as an artifact of contemporary Hollywood to, say, Sophia Loren or Marcello Mastroianni.) The guilt quotient would make a French person's teeth ache, but is critical for Santa Monica sensibilities. And for Mark's total exoneration.

Atruly unapologetic affair wouldn't have hinged on the Hollywood Good Guy theory of equivalences. How many drunken binges and missed soccer games/P.T.A. meetings equals one extramarital affair? In order for viewers to excuse Mark's affair, Lorna has to be incorrigible, and she is: according to my count, Lorna has three drunken benders in the first episode, including one that culminates in a three-way screaming match between her and Marc and her best friend, and one binge with the girls (most of whom want to have sex with her husband). She misses one crucial meeting with her producer, the big soccer game where her son is made goalie, and the school play. No matter how smart she is, how equally responsible for the car and the mortgage payments, how much pain she's in, or how much further pain she'll be in when she hears about the fling, Lorna Deserved This. She was a bad wife and mother. I suppose some might find this rare admission refreshing; I find it merely depressing.

Can this marriage be saved? Let's see. My guess is that they are earning about $500,000 a script. If they break up, for a while, neither is worth half as much. But she's in much worse trouble than he is. She can't pitch without him. And he can always find another partner. Studios hear she's difficult. They love him. And so do the girls.

by Lynda Obst, The New York Times, June 1, 2003, Sunday