HOLLYWOOD- OK, this is confusing, so stick with me a minute.
In the new ABC sitcom Hope & Faith, Faith Ford plays Hope and Kelly Ripa stars as Faith.
“We're confused, too,” confessed series creator Joanna Johnson. “We have a jar in the writers' room and every time you say `Faith' when you mean `Hope,' you have to put a dollar in, and I've already lost about $50.”
Ford said the show was not written with her in mind, so the character names are a coincidence.
The series focuses on two sisters, Hope, the suburban mother, and Faith, a fired soap star. Hope is organized, Faith is a mess.
“Normally, on a soap opera you're not dead until you as a person are dead, and even that can be negotiated,” said Ripa, who starred on the daytime soap All My Children for more than a decade. “We do something innovative. When you die on a soap opera, you're killed and brought back as your evil twin. My character's evil twin kills her, then kills herself. This is groundbreaking! Expect to see this pop up on all the shows.”
Ripa's Children character is away in California, but she doesn't rule out returning to the daytime soap. And she'll continue to host Live with Regis and Kelly. (Hope & Faith will tape in New York, as does Regis.)
“[Regis] has been wonderful the entire time,” Ripa said. “He likes to play the gruff guy who is constantly goading me on the air, but he's been great. I'm hoping he'll do a cameo once in a while on this show. I'm hoping he'll play the sleazy agent down the road.”
Ford, who doesn't have children, said she wanted to play a mom because she's naturally mothering and saw it as an escape. Ripa, who has three children, dismissed any notions of her as an uber-mom.
“Children are a lot like pancakes,” she said. “You sort of ruin the first one and get better at it the second time. By the third one, you get to flip it over at just the right time. I think we sort of gravitated toward roles that aren't necessarily what we are.”
Hope & Faith is part of ABC's revival of the TGIF - Thank Goodness It's Funny - Friday night lineup, airing at 9 p.m. this fall.
Contrary to statements by WB executives in May, Angel executive producer Joss Whedon said, actress Charisma Carpenter may appear on the drama series again. Though she's no longer a series regular, Whedon said, he wants Carpenter to return to give closure to her character's story. Carpenter's Cordelia ended the season in May in a coma.
“That's what we want, but it's dependent on her schedule,” Whedon said Sunday at a WB party. “We know what we want to do; it's just a question of when to do it.”
Angel, which has decent WB-sized ratings in original episodes but doesn't perform well in reruns, won a late renewal reprieve in May. The end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from which Angel was spun off, helped Angel's case.
“With the departure of Buffy, we thought we had a great opportunity to grow the show,” said WB Entertainment president Jordan Levin. To that end, executives asked Whedon to write more self-contained stories.
“Last season was basically a 22-hour episode,” Whedon acknowledged. “We started the show saying we'll be stand-alone, and then, I don't want to say we failed so much as decided that wasn't what we were really interested in. Now that we have an almost unwieldy cast, we can do stand-alone episodes but still have character resonance in them.”
James Marsters, who played the vampire Spike on Buffy, will join Angel in the first episode, but Whedon wouldn't explain how the character, killed in the Buffy finale, will be resurrected, except to say the amulet he held during his demise will play a role in Spike's revival.
“The second episode deals with what the [heck] he's doing there,” Whedon said. “In the old version of the show, we might have stretched that out for a lot of episodes. In the new version of the show, by the end of that [episode] you'll know why he's there and more importantly what part he plays in the ensemble.”
Now that Team Angel will be working for its former nemesis, the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart, it will vacate its hotel base and move into “swank new apartments.”
“The [hotel] lobby was beautiful, but eventually it was a giant room with all of our people standing around talking, and our writers would just want to kill themselves trying to find a new way to do that,” Whedon said of the pending set changes.
A new character, who “might just be a little bit sexy,” will join the show as a go-between at Wolfram & Hart. Characters from Buffy and Angel episodes past, including conniving Lilah, may return, but the only one confirmed so far is the ditzy vampire Harmony.
The Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Rob Owen, who is on the Television Critics Association Press Tour, is the TV editor for the Post-Gazette.
First Published July 16, 2003, 10:02 a.m.
