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“Old Christine” Creator Kari Lizer on the Sitcom and Its Same-Sex Wedding

Although it has no LGBT characters, CBS’s The New Adventures of Old Christine is one that queer audiences should be checking out – for several reasons.

This sharply written sitcom about a divorced mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who lives with her brother, recently married her female best friend and is oftentimes too closely involved in her ex-husband’s life (whose new girlfriend is also named Christine, hence the show’s title), kicked off its fourth season last fall.

Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, series creator Kari Lizer recently talked to us about how Christine came to be, and the surprising lack of controvery the show’s same-sex wedding generated.

After having a semi-successful acting career up until she turned 30, Lizer turned to writing with the intent she’d write acting parts for herself. Instead of acting gigs, however, her comedic writing got her noticed and a career was born when she was hired to write for USA Network’s Weird Science.

She eventually landed a job as a writer/producer on the uber-gay Will & Grace, where Lizer stayed for four years before she ventured into the treacherous world of television development with a project starring Anne Heche that never went beyond the pilot stage.

“[After that project] it was really trying to find something for me that felt authentic,” said Lizer, “and obviously going to the well of my own circumstances. There’s a lot to draw from there.”

Enter The New Adventures of Old Christine, a sitcom about the world of divorced mother Christine Campbell (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), which draws on Lizer’s experience as a divorced mother of three.

Christine would garner strong ratings soon after its 2006 premiere by not only squashing talk of the “Seinfeld Curse” (where any subsequent project by Seinfeld cast members was doomed to fail) but by seeing Louis-Dreyfus go home with the Best Actress Emmy for her role.

Going into its fourth season last fall, two big weddings were a part of the landscape – the long-awaited nuptials between Christine’s ex, Richard (Clark Gregg) and “new” Christine (Emily Rutherfurd), which is set to air this spring, and the wedding in the season premiere between Christine and her best friend and business partner, Barb (Wanda Sykes), just prior to the passage of Proposition 8 in California.

Barb isn’t gay, but she married Christine in order to stay in the country (her character is a resident of the Bahamas).

Lizer was ready for, well, everything to hit the fan with this storyline – but her phone was unexpectedly quiet.

Surprisingly, and I really am surprised, we’ve done a lot of that stuff this year and we’ve really taken a stance and there’s not been a peep. There really isn’t. I think, to their credit, as long as we are hopefully doing it in a way that’s still funny and we’re not just wagging our finger at people, which we’re hoping that’s not what we’re doing, they’ve been great. They’ve been really supportive and they love those episodes. And then the Megan Mullally one comes along and blows the lid off it. I kept waiting for the phone call but it never came.

In fact, when Megan Mullally guested to enforce a no-same-sex clause in the business owned by Christine and Barb (but would later make a pass at Christine), The New Adventures of Old Christine reached a season-high number of viewers.

Even with the return of ratings-monster American Idol last month in the same Wednesday time slot as Christine, the show is holding up remarkably well in the ratings.

More attention was focused on the show last November when Sykes publicly came out in Las Vegas after the passing of Prop 8.

The comedian told the crowd she hadn’t come out publicly before because, “I didn’t feel like I had to. I was just living my life, not necessarily in the closet, but I was living my life.” But after the passage of Prop. 8, she said, “Now, I gotta get in their face. I’m proud to be a woman. I’m proud to be a black woman, and I’m proud to be gay.”

Louis-Dreyfus, who openly has spoken out against Prop 8 on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, told The Advocate recently, “She’s a private person. So [coming out] was a big decision for her. I’m proud of her.”

The respect the cast has for one another is one of the reasons Lizer enjoys working on Old Christine. “I don’t know if I can ever do another television show because I will never get this group of gems again,” she said.

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