A New Series With a Past, Present and Future

Some series have smarts, some have sizzle. “Any Day Now” has both, making it flat-out the season’s best new hour of weekly drama, and one of the most absorbing in all of television.

As entertaining as it is, it remains maddeningly uneven after premiering three months ago, and you’d hope that any week now it would put everything together and truly soar. It has that potential.

“Any Day Now” is not on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB or UPN, but reaches only a couple of million viewers a week on cable’s Lifetime network, which calls itself “television for women.”

For men, too, in this case, even though the two protagonists are women, former childhood pals--one black, one white--who have resumed their friendship in Birmingham, Ala., after years of separation. And the series in large part addresses the direction that friendship takes.

African American Rene Jackson (Lorraine Toussaint) is a single former Washington, D.C., attorney who is adjusting, at times awkwardly, to her return to Birmingham after her father’s death. Her best friend, Mary Elizabeth O’Brien (Annie Potts), is having little success juggling her desire to be a writer with her role as wife and mother.

What’s more, her Jerry Springer-watching, good ol’ boy of a husband, Collier (Chris Mulkey), goes through streaks of heavy drinking and joblessness that infuriate her. It’s not that her life is so bad, she glumly tells him at one point, “It’s just not the one I expected to have.”

“Any Day Now” has heart and passion, and a cast that can deliver on its promise, with Toussaint, in particular, capable of stunning intensity. This is not another of those oozy stories about racial harmony, however, in this case with the two parties locking arms and marching off into the sunset singing, “We Shall Overcome.” Each lugs a lot of baggage as adults, and just as their personal histories intersect here, so do the nation’s past and present.

The best episode to date, in fact, was about descendants of former slaves still bearing the emotional and financial scars of their ancestors being disenfranchised by whites, an inspired hour that culminated emotionally with a gnarled lynching tree being felled.

The Birmingham setting is crucial, for the series repeatedly intercuts the present with flashbacks from the turbulent civil-rights era of the early ‘60s in which Rene and M.E. (as Rene calls her) grew up together. That was roughly the environment, too, for “I’ll Fly Away,” a thoughtful series about Southern race relations that ran on NBC in the early ‘90s and later became the basis for a PBS movie.

“Any Day Now” is much livelier. In another strong episode about values, Rene was flooded by childhood memories--of notorious Sheriff “Bull” Connor turning police dogs, cattle prods and fire hoses on civil-rights marchers in 1963--while representing a black city councilman accused of taking kickbacks. The script had Rene allowing race to initially cloud her judgment. The man she defended was an old family friend and former civil-rights activist whom she believed was being attacked because he was an “uppity” black. And when she later dropped him after concluding he was corrupt, a brick came through her window, recalling the old days of 35 years ago. Only this time the source was African American.

The series is also threaded with humor, as in one episode that flashed back adorably to young Rene (Shari Dyon Perry) getting her first period and acquiring a “How to Be a Woman” kit with her initial package of sanitary pads. “Being a woman,” she told the young M.E. (Mae Middleton) sternly, “isn’t nothing to joke about.”

Although Toussaint and especially Potts deliver witty lines adroitly, much of “Any Day Now” is nothing to joke about. The title means that “any day now these little girls will be women and any day now our country will wake up to the issue of racism,” said executive producer Nancy Miller, a 44-year-old Louisiana native who as a child spent summers with her grandparents and other family in Birmingham.

She said that a flashback to the assassination of John F. Kennedy will come in this season’s concluding episode. And arriving in March is an episode that will relate little Rene and her family to the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church whose black victims (ages 11-14) were memorialized movingly in Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls.”

“Any Day Now” seems unclear at times about which set of Rene and M.E. it wants to focus on, and the transitions between their adult and younger versions are sometimes strained and executed with visible seams. Moreover, there are deep inconsistencies in Collier and M.E. In one episode (featuring Potts’ “Designing Women” co-star Delta Burke as her nasty sister), for example, M.E. wanted to hand Collier a $35,000 inheritance check to buy a boat. Yet Tuesday she berates him for overspending on printing for their new contracting business.

In fact, Tuesday’s finale of a two-part story arc--pairing a suspenseful stalker theme with intrusive flashbacks to Klan violence--buckles from the weight of its own ambition and script conveniences.

Coming soon, though, is a vibrant, tender and sometimes-funny episode about skin tone in which Rene’s long-absent cousin, a young man with a pale complexion, shows up seeking help from the black family he had ignored in his years of living as a white.

It’s something you won’t find on the networks that rejected Miller in her years of trying to persuade them to take a chance on “Any Day Now.” Their loss. Also, it’s an opportunity for Rene to enlighten M.E. about the history of slavery and race-mixing. “I have two words for you,” Rene says. “Thomas Jefferson!”

Here are two more words: Fine stuff!