Lauren Graham may just be the goodluck charm needed for the NBC series “Parenthood.” Casting the wildly appealing star of the long-running hit “Gilmore Girls” reversed a peculiar streak of bad luck visited upon the series, originally set to bow on September 23, 2009.
The first tragedy to strike the show was the death on April 30, 2009, of 44-year-old Nora O’Brien, NBC’s executive in charge of drama, who died on the Sausalito, Calif. set of the series. She experienced a brain aneurysm while playing basketball with the cast and crew during a break in filming.
The second upset came a few months later when, on July 10, series star Maura Tierney was diagnosed with breast cancer. “Parenthood” was pushed back to midseason and its Wednesday night slot was filled by the middling medical drama “Mercy.” Things got worse in September, when Tierney, also 44, announced that she was leaving the show to better accommodate her treatment schedule.
“Parenthood” has a large ensemble cast of seasoned actors, everyone from familiar TV faces such Peter Krause and Craig T. Nelson to folks such as Peter Krause and Craig T. Nelson to folks you haven’t seen in a while, like Bonnie Bedelia. Tierney had name recognition from her long tenure as Abby Lockhart on “ER.” She would be hard to replace. Helen Hunt, a “Mad About You” star before she won as Oscar for “As Good As It Gets,” seemed like a good solution, but talks fell through.
Graham, who had her own “Gilmore Girls” following, seemed to make more sense. She had just done a revival of “Guys and Dolls” on Broadway, and a pilot that wasn’t picked up, when she got the call.
“This kind of came up. It wasn’t anything I planned on doing,” says Graham, 43. “I told myself, I’m not playing a single mom again, that’s for sure. But I kind of fell in love with it.”
All of Tierney’s scenes had to be reshot in the pilot. “The whole situation was very unusual,” Graham says. “The cast didn’t know what was going to happen. It was difficult. I think they’d waited a long time and to have movement [was good]. It just had to move forward. I looked at it as: can I do this part? Mainly, do I connect to this job?”
Graham plays Sarah Braverman, one of the series’ four siblings and the one whose life is in the worst shape. Sarah’s broke. She’s so broke she has to move back in with her parents (Nelson, Bedelia). Her ex is a burnt-out musician. She’s 38 and her job prospects are nil. Her two children are truculent and, in her own words, “degenerate.” In the airport of life, this is baggage you want to check.
Accustomed to Amy Sherman- Palladino’s rapid-fire dialogue on “Gilmore Girls,” Graham liked the change of pace on “Parenthood.”
“This show is more about silences. Small reactions and what people don’t say and subtext. It feels more like the experience of making a film,” she says.”I like a show where people talk the way I talk. That’s incredibly hard to find. ‘Gilmore Girls’ turned more on the word. I loved doing that language. There’s a kind of athleticism in lifting those speeches.”
But she also likes the challenge of playing Sarah Braverman. “This is somebody who’s not in a great place. Somebody’s who starting over again,” Graham says. “Someone who doesn’t have great selfesteem.”
Graham hadn’t worked with most of the cast before. She and co-star Peter Krause, who plays Sarah’s older brother, Adam, had both done an episode of the CBS comedy “Caroline in the City.”
“He’s one of the first people I met when I came out here,” she says fondly.
Graham has the classic waitress-turnedactress story of many aspiring performers. The neighborhood where she lived and worked was Park Slope and the restaurant was the popular Santa Fe Grill. Graham worked shifts there between auditions. “I told myself, I’m not going let go of this day job until I am a full-time actor,” she says. “First I got a play in New Jersey and then I got a pilot in LA.”
She moved to LA in 1995 and worked steadily, guest-spots on hits like “Seinfeld” and “NewsRadio,” and three short-lived series, including “Townies,” with Molly Ringwald and Jenna Elfman, and “Lush Life.” When “Gilmore Girls” made her a star in 2000, the show also gave a loyal fan base, many of which came to see on Broadway, even though it was off the air.
“I forgot about reruns,” Graham says. “Who knew about generations of younger girls and younger moms? Is ‘Gilmore Girls’ going to be like ‘Laverne and Shirley’ was to me? I got to know that show in reruns.”
The show also gave her lifelong friendships. Graham excitedly tells how she ran into Alexis Bledel, the actress who played her daughter on the show at a magazine photo shoot and how they went out afterward to catch up. Broadway veteran Kelly Bishop, who played her prickly mother on the show, came to see Graham backstage the night “Guys and Dolls” closed after 113 performances.
“It’s my really proud moment. The theater is obviously her world and she was such a big supporter of mine,” Graham says.
Although Graham is close with her family, including her father, Lawrence, who raised her after he split with her mom, Donna Grant, and has an annual Christmas party with a very competitive game of charades, she has never married.
“Honestly, I didn’t grow up with those fantasies,” she says. “I was really ambitious. I haven’t yet wanted to be married but it’s something I’m for and might do someday.”
Till then, she’ll hang out with her half-sister Shade, who was named after a painting (“We have the same mother, different fathers,” Graham explains), and go on vacations with her dad.
“We’re just really close. We did a bike trip through Ireland a couple of summers ago,” she says. “My dad gets in better and better shape as he gets older, which is kind of annoying.”
She prefers that face-to-face contact than any kind of companionship the Internet might provide. Graham could care less about Twitter and does not belong to MySpace or Facebook.
“I’m not on Facebook, but there are people on there pretending to be me,” she says. “I’m pretty private. I don’t want to tell people anything, ever. . . I think it’s such a strange world. Too much oversharing. Everybody should keep their eyes on their own paper.”
PARENTHOOD
Tuesday, 8 p.m., NBC