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For a television actress, it's hard to have it all: a husband, children and a hit series. But Dixie Carter has a good chance to achieve everything with her new series, Designing Women.
Designing Women, my choice as the best new situation comedy of the fall season, airs at 9:30 p.m. Monday on CBS-TV (KIMA-TV, Channel 29). It stars Carter, Delta Burke, Jean Smart and Annie Potts as four women who run an interior-decorating company in Atlanta.
CBS, nurturing this new sitcom carefully, has placed it in what TV programmers call a "hammock," a prime position on the schedule between two established hits. Following Newhart and preceding Cagney & Lacey,
Designing Women enjoys a time slot for which many producers would be happy to pay a sizable bribe.
Designing Women is worth the attention because it fulfills the No. 1 requirement for a comedy: It's funny. For the past couple of seasons, copying the easygoing atmosphere of The Cosby Show, sitcoms have tended to be warm and wiggly, light family frolics, such as Growing Pains. But hilarity has been rare, as few have gone for the guffaw.
Carter's new series is about as far as you can get from the family setting of Family Ties. Not only are all of the Designing Women single, but there are seldom any men around within earshot as they discuss their affairs and ambitions. Since they have no children to rear or husbands to stroke, their talk is tart and taut, aiming for the bull's-eye of belly laughs.
Carter plays Julia Sugarbaker, a widow, and Burke is her younger sister, Suzanne Sugarbaker, a free spirit who has been married so often that her secretary files her alimony checks in alphabetical order. Their design firm, headquartered in a handsome townhouse, is called Sugarbaker & Associates.
The associates are Charlene Frazier, portrayed by Smart, and Mary Jo Shively, played by Potts. Charlene is crisp and efficient; Mary Jo is a beginner in the working world, still learning how to function in a business atmosphere.
The roots of Designing Women go back to Filthy Rich, a comedy canceled three years ago by CBS. Both Carter and Burke starred on that series, which was created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who is also the creator of Designing Women.
Describing the genesis of Designing Women, Carter said, "Linda called me and asked me if she could use my name in her presentation to CBS. She wrote the part for me. She wouldn't have written that character necessarily. For all four of us, she wrote the characters."
Wanting Bloodworth-Thomason to do another series after Filthy Rich, CBS suggested another idea to her. According to Carter, Bloodworth-Thomason replied, "I don't want to do that. If you'll give me these four women, I'll make their mouths move, and it will be funny."
Friction between the Sugarbaker sisters is frequent. Julia says sarcastically, "Suzanne, if sex were fast food, there would be an arch over your bed." Later, making an introduction, Suzanne gets even with "This is my older sister, Julia, grown bitter from years of living in my shadow."
Discussing her character, Carter said, "I have a lot of input. Linda hasn't written us, but she's written what we as actresses prefer. Character suggestions I make are always accepted.
"I had so many swipes at my sister in the pilot that I thought it was very important to establish that Julia loves Suzanne in her own way. So the second show has a bit of that in it, where I come to her defense. It's like I can talk about my sister, but nobody else can."
Carter has a clear fix on where the show is supposed to center. "The concept is that the four women will talk without men around to overhear," she said. As you will notice if you watch, that makes for a maximum of candor and spice and the minimum of June-moon-spoon-swoon sentimentality about the relations between women and men.
The light Southern accent that Carter employs in her role as Julia comes naturally to the actress, who was born in McLemoresville, Tenn. She graduated from Memphis State University in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in English.
Carter's original ambition was to be an opera singer. But when she went to New York after college to pursue that goal, there "came the rude awakening. My voice simply wasn't big enough for opera."
It was ample for acting, however, as she discovered when she auditioned for producer Joseph Papp. He cast her in her first role, in the Central Park production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.
Romance interrupted acting when she met a businessman named Arthur Carter. "When I met him, I thought it was destiny," she said. "I became Dixie Carter Carter."
Divorced eight years later, she returned to acting, first in New York and then in Hollywood. She kept busy for most of the past decade as a regular on four series: as advertising copywriter April Baxter in On Our Own (1977-78), Aunt Marion in Out of the Blue (1979), rich and snooty Carlotta Beck on Filthy Rich (1982-83) and Maggie McKinney, a TV exercise-show hostess who married Conrad Bain in the last season of Diff'rent Strokes (1984-85).
Carter was married and divorced from actor George Hearn before marrying actor Hal Holbrook in 1984. Her two teen-age daughters from her first marriage live with her and Holbrook.
Asked whether it was a help or a hindrance to be married to another performer who is equally active, Carter said it was an advantage to share her life with "somebody who is so kind and wonderful and treats me so well, and who I love. The fact that we're in the business is an enhancement of our romance.
"We understand when time has to be taken away for what we do," she said. "It's the opposite of a problem."
You might call that the personal and professional equivalent of a series hammocked on a schedule between Newhart and Cagney and Lacey.
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