J.J. Abrams recently announced the cast of his upcoming sci-fi pilot, Fringe. To most fans, I suppose the big news is that Mr. “I Discovered Keri Russell and Jennifer Garner” has chosen the beautiful-but-unknown-in-the-States actress Anna Torv to play the lead.

But the casting bit that caught my eye was the news that one of my most beloved ’80s TV stars, Blair Brown, will play “the brilliant Nina Cord, a 16-year veteran at Prometheus Corp., a cutting-edge research facility.”

Cutting-edge, indeed. The Divine Ms. B was, of course, the star of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, a laugh-track-less dramedy that ran, starting in 1987, for two years on NBC before being picked up for another three seasons on then-nascent Lifetime. A year before Murphy Brown began its epic run redefining what it was to be a complicated woman in the 1980s, Blair Brown’s Molly Dodd was a quick-witted, complex, vaguely employed, literate libertine who captured the essence of New York womanhood at the time. She was a charmingly neurotic cross between Mary Richards and Annie Hall. And along with Woody Allen’s 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1988’s Crossing Delancey and the following year’s When Harry Met Sally, it informed my opinion of New York as a cultural, multiethnic, funny, intelligent place that I someday wanted to live. … continue reading