‘Molly Dodd’ Trim, Funny for Cable

All right, Molly Dodd fans. She’s bahhhhhh -ack.

“The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”--a wonderfully wry and ironic series that was dropped by NBC in 1988 because of low ratings--resumes first-run life tonight on cable’s Lifetime. That means:

--A smaller budget.

But it’s “not too much” smaller and it’s a “doable budget,” said “Molly Dodd” creator-producer-director-sometimes-writer Jay Tarses from New York, where the series is filmed. “We don’t have the fat anymore, so we can’t make too many mistakes, that’s all.”

--A smaller audience.

Although Lifetime claims to reach 41 million households, the number of viewers watching “Molly Dodd” on Lifetime surely will be puny compared to even its tiniest audience on NBC, an audience deemed too small for survival. “We know that we’re not going to have the mass audience,” Tarses said. “But we’re going to have people who will want to watch the show.”

Nothing beats feeling wanted.

“The difference is that Lifetime is tickled to have us and we don’t have to feel like a stepsister,” said Tarses, who feels that “Molly Dodd” was mishandled by NBC and still sounds bitter about NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff’s earlier public bashing of the show.

The first of 13 new “Molly Dodd” half-hours produced for Lifetime airs at 8:30 p.m., following a previously unaired episode of the original series at 8.

Monday is a one-shot time slot. Starting April 29, the new “Molly Dodd” will air twice on Saturdays, at 2 and 10 p.m.

Enough with the announcements. The only one that matters is that, based on sampling the unaired NBC episode and the first two made for Lifetime, “Molly Dodd” is still magic.

It’s the feeling you haven’t felt, the sound you haven’t heard, the rare series that’s almost impossible to define. When you try, you feel like Molly’s shy, tongue-knotted boyfriend, Moss Goodman. It’s . . . uh . . . just . . . I mean . . . well.

Regardless, if you watch it and like it, you’ll know. Comedy, dramedy, shmamedy or whatever. Magic!

Perfectly played by red-haired Blair Brown, Molly is a restless, sometimes-jobless, often-aimless, always appealing 38-year-old divorcee living in New York and trying to gain control of her life. Whether she will is a tossup.

The funny unaired NBC episode finds Moss (David Stathairn) abandoning Molly for Switzerland (he’ll return later this season), leaving her at yet another crossroads.

The still-funnier first Lifetime episode finds Molly again looking for employment, after quitting her job at Moss’ bookstore, and welcoming her ex-husband Fred (William Converse-Roberts) back into her life as a friend.

Meanwhile, the second Lifetime episode is actually laughing-out-loud funny, a rarity for a series in which amusement always seemed to merge with melancholia.

That’s the irony: “Molly Dodd’ certainly doesn’t look less expensive than it did on NBC. And the smaller budget and smaller audience may equal bigger laughs, something that NBC always wanted.

Much later this season, Molly gets raped and becomes pregnant. No giddiness there. Yet, said Tarses, “I think we’re funnier this year. The jokes are better. The writers we used this year tend to be more facile. And Blair is trying to play it a little lighter. I think the show is better all around.”

Returning regulars beside Brown are James Greene as Davey, the erudite doorman/elevator operator for all seasons, and Allyn Ann McLerie as Molly’s widowed mother, who now has a boyfriend of her own.

Happily, one character who didn’t survive the change of venues was Molly’s broadly written sister, whom Tarses found “cartoonish.”

One character who not only survives but also is getting vastly more exposure is Fred, an unreliable musician who Molly never got over and who continued to haunt her thoughts. Now he’s her confidante.

“We brought Fred back as an ally because it seems we did all the torture we could do and we had to go to a new plateau or the character would be useless,” Tarses said. “Also, if she needed a man to go to and confide in, why not have Fred be the one? She’s a woman of 38, instead of 35 when we started, and crunch time is sort of approaching.”

Just as Lifetime saved “Molly Dodd” from extinction, “Molly Dodd” has rescued Lifetime from the anonymity that comes with being a low-profile cable network that has no strong identity. The Molly-to-Lifetime move has captured the kind of media attention previously unknown to Lifetime, and Brown may soon eclipse Dr. Ruth Westheimer as Lifetime’s biggest star.

Tarses is looking toward May when “Molly Dodd” ends production and Lifetime decides whether to order additional episodes. As enigmatic as Molly, Tarses sometimes sounds anxious to continue the series forever, other times just as anxious to retire it after its present run.

Meanwhile, tonight’s the night, as Molly’s mother marks the show’s new beginning this way in the opening moments of the first Lifetime episode: “Fade to music and let’s see if there’s really an audience out there watching cable.”