An Entire Drama in One Word When Lifetime’s ‘Any Day Now’ confronted the power of a racial epithet, emotions ran high on and off the screen.

“Of course she’s going to keep saying ‘nigger,’ that’s the whole point,” yells writer Denitra Harris Lawrence across the crowded courtroom set of “Any Day Now.” She’s 10 hours into a production day that started well before daybreak on the Lifetime series’ third-season finale, a special two-hour episode airing in March, in which Birmingham civil rights attorney Rene Jackson (Lorraine Toussaint) puts the racial epithet on trial.

Aside from the long hours, Harris Lawrence says, this has been a particularly difficult episode to shoot. “Everyone around here, in the beginning was a little uncomfortable hearing the word so much,” says Harris Lawrence, who is African American.

But this episode is supposed to prompt those squeamish feelings, or at the very least provoke a little thoughtful discussion among its viewers on the way in which the word has become one of the most loathed in the English language, evoking images of hatred and fear in some; while at the same time, others have chosen to embrace it as a way of empowerment--with the divisions running along racial and generational lines.

This is, of course, typical of the brave little cable series that navigates the treacherous regions of race and racism in America. It’s this journey into the muddied waters of bigotry that other prime-time series--broadcast or cable--have largely stayed away from since the days of “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons.” But that is precisely what fuels the drama, from creators Nancy Miller and Gary A. Randall, that follows the friendship between Jackson, who is black, and her childhood pal, Mary Elizabeth O’Brien (Annie Potts), a white housewife. Both live in the same Alabama town they grew up in during the ‘60s civil rights movement. And now the show’s executive producers are dipping into the creme de la creme of the indigestible smorgasbord left over from Jim Crow.

“I read a story about a kid who was kicked out of school [for fighting] because someone called him a ‘nigger,’ ” Miller explains. “Then I read in the Los Angeles Times about a black kid who went up to another black kid and said, ‘Whassup nigga,’ and he got expelled because the school has a zero tolerance policy about using this word, and then a guy loses his job because he said the word ‘niggardly.’ And from the O.J. [Simpson murder] case . . . how the press coined the ‘N-word’ to talk about things that were going on in the courtroom. And it got me thinking about this word, and how there’s just no other word in our language that is as horrible as that.

“I think there is a distinction between the white point of view and the black point of view about this word,” Miller continues, “and I don’t think the hip-hop movement will diminish the ugliness of this word. It’s still too volatile. [I’m] a white person from the South who knows the hatefulness of that word--all the people who got hurt from that word, who died from that word. It’s just so hard to see it as benign.”

In the episode titled “It’s Not Just a Word,” the first hour written by Miller, the second half by Harris Lawrence, Jackson finds herself in the middle of an unusual self-defense case. Her argument: that an African American high school basketball player who hit, and subsequently killed, a white student retaliated in fear for his life after being called a nigger. This despite the fact that his best friend and key witness, Ajoni (Derrex Brady), who’s also Mary Elizabeth’s black son-in-law, perceived no immediate danger from the use of the slur.

It’s not just a case of sticks and stones and words that cannot hurt. But whether the very utterance of the word--though bandied about in music and movies, and sometimes used in an affectionate way among African Americans--can also be regarded as a threat to an African American. “You will find old white people of a certain generation who will still, to this day, use the word as the most derogatory insult that can be hurled,” Toussaint says during a break from taping the heated courtroom scene. “It’s a word of violence and an awful, awful word.

“And then you have the other end of the spectrum,” she continues, “young people--young blacks, young Asians, young whites--who are referring to each other as ‘My nigga’ like ‘That’s my boy,’ ” she says, admitting, “I use it as a term of endearment. I surely do--among my peers and with my significant other, as we say in the community, with my man. And there are some people who don’t approve of that. It’s a personal choice. But that’s the interesting thing about this word, because it has evolved. African Americans secretly reclaimed this word unbeknownst to most of the white community, and for two or three generations, it really was our own, and we kept it as our own. Now it’s out. Everybody’s saying it now.”

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Much of the discussion during the evolution of the “Any Day Now” episode dealt with the cultural nuances of the word. “I don’t think white people really comprehend the difference between ‘nigga’ with an ‘a’ and ‘nigger’ with an ‘er,’ ” says one of the show’s three executive producers, Randall, who is white, referring to the word’s use in popular vernacular versus the traditional slur. “Whereas black people have such different usages for this word. With an ‘a,’ [it] seems to be a friendly, ‘you’re my pal’ kind of thing, whereas ‘er,’ at least to the middle-aged demographic, still has an onus on it. I don’t know how it applies to younger black kids.”

Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC’s School of Cinema-Television and author of “Am I Black Enough for You: Popular Culture From the ‘Hood and Beyond,” has his own analysis of the word and its evolution and impact. “We have to accept the fact that words, over time, their meanings and connotations change,” he explains. “You often hear people say that we shouldn’t use words like ‘nigger’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘ho.’ But it’s not the word that’s problematic. The word is representative of a situation that is problematic. Because you don’t say ‘nigger’ doesn’t mean that racism has disappeared in America. Because you don’t say ‘bitch’ or ‘ho’ doesn’t mean that sexism or misogyny has disappeared in America. People give the word more power than it deserves by trying to censor it.

“When it comes down to it,” Boyd says, “it’s like a family. In the family unit there is a conversation that is particular to that family. Any outsider who would attempt to engage in that conversation would be out of pocket. People can not accept the fact this is, and I know it’s a cliche, but it’s a black thing, and it simply points up one situation where the sort of conversation amongst a culture of people may not be applicable to the society as a whole.”

Already this season, “Any Day Now” has tackled stories involving racial profiling, mixed-race marriages, and light skin-dark skin segregation within the African American community. Taking on this dubious word, however, would prove to be a more arduous undertaking, one that began in July.

Even though it’s a blistering, 113-degree summer day outside the Santa Clarita-based Paid Our Dues production studio, it’s hotter in Miller’s office. And there’s not much central air can do to cool off the debate that, at nearly 1 p.m., has already been going on for several hours.

This discussion is supposed to help the writers fill in the blanks of the four-act story on the erasable white board. But right now, there isn’t so much as a scribble past the first column marked “Teaser,” which continually changes.

Miller is wringing the ends of her hair, and she looks as if she could use a cigarette, as she, Randall and the writing staff--which includes four black women, three white women and a white man--argue, back and forth, about a six-letter word that, according to the black staffers, is “owned” by African Americans. And they say it’s up to whites to learn the rules.

But Miller isn’t buying into the dual “N-word” theory, so more discussion ensues. And there’s screaming. Lots of it. Faces are reddening. Hands waving fiercely to punctuate the important points. The air is thick with disagreement and frustration. It is tense. Like a cocktail party that’s veered off in the wrong direction onto a topic that’s typically considered taboo in mixed gatherings.

Strewn about the coffee table, among the pre-lunchtime munchies--bags of Chips Ahoy and Cheetos, miscellaneous bottles of Arrowhead water and soda, and candy wrappers--are years of historical references to the word in books by James Baldwin and Ellis Cose.

There are some albums by comic Richard Pryor and CDs by ‘60s black-power radicals the Last Poets and rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls in which various derivations of the word are used. And there’s a legal tome with the 1942 Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire ruling, which lists “nigger” among words that can be used to incite violence. When lunch rolls around an hour later, all in the room look like they could light up a pack.

“Whenever we tackle a sensitive topic,” Miller says later, “it causes more discussion in the room, and the more discussion, the more time it takes. But when it triggers this much discussion is when we really get excited because we know we have something interesting.”

By October, there’s still more discussion on how to apply the past three months of research to a compelling, and coherent, episode. They’ve already been through a few drafts and meetings with the network. It would be several more weeks before the scribbles on the remaining columns on the white board would take shape.

And still, even during the mid-January afternoon shoot, Harris Lawrence is jotting down another rewrite for a scene. At the same time, she’s debating with a production assistant about whether to use one Tupac single over another that used the word a little less frequently for a different scene.

“I just hope I never hear this word again,” she later says.

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While it is certainly “Any Day Now’s” intention to entertain viewers, the producers make no bones about also trying to educate the public, by continually pushing those hot-button race topics that have become taboo in prime-time television’s politically correct environment.

“I don’t know if anyone is talking about this,” says Kelly Goode Abugov, Lifetime’s West Coast head of creative affairs. “You hear the word, but I’m not sure there’s much discussion about it [on television]. As a programmer, it’s important to feel as though your viewers can find something that they can’t find elsewhere. And with a topic like this, we felt we had to make it really feel involving to an audience without sounding like it’s a history lesson.

“We have to be as unique and as hard-hitting as possible with a subject like this, otherwise I don’t think viewers will accept it. It’s gotta feel as smart as the conversation that they would have about the topic in their own home.”

Toussaint agrees that if the dialogue didn’t feel real, it wouldn’t play. “I think that’s one of the things our show does,” she says. “It tries to, if not solve the complexity, just bring it to the light. So I’m excited, but it’s a difficult issue to shoot. It’s a difficult episode to shoot, because you have to get up all in it, and all of the levels of it. And because our writing staff is both black and white, and Annie [Potts] is white, I’m black, we’re forced to look inside of ourselves to examine our own personal relationships to it.”

Potts remembers powerful feelings that surfaced during shooting, churned up and roiled by having to use the racial slur. “There was one particular scene for Lorraine and I,” Potts says, “and we covered it and covered it and I said, ‘I would rather go to the gallows than have to shoot this scene one more time,’ because we had to use that word repeatedly and I had to turn that word on her.

“Even in the play of actors acting out a scene, to look into my friend’s eyes, and my fellow actor, who I so adore, and say those words to her. It was just very, very difficult. . . . And I know Lenny Bruce said, if we just say it, say it, say it, say it, say it, then it’ll lose all its power. But that was 30 years ago, and I think Lenny Bruce might have been a little shortsighted. I don’t think that that word has lost its power. It has retained all of its propensity for hurt. It has barbs all over it. I’ll be glad for the day when you look that word up in the dictionary, and either it doesn’t exist or it says: This was a hurtful epithet used many, many, many, many years ago, and it’s no longer used.”

Until then, the debate rages on. “For me, the word is very interesting and compelling, because it has these multiple uses,” notes USC’s Boyd. “The fact that two generations of African Americans--the civil rights generation and the hip-hop generation--would have such different meaning for the use of the word points to the fact that there is very little communication going on across the generations.

“As it relates to mainstream white society,” Boyd continues, “here’s a word that has a culturally specific meaning, which is based on racist history. The fact that this word is able to span this spectrum suggests that this is a word that should be further explored. What we need to do is confront these issues as opposed to sweeping them under the rug as we have done so many times in the past.”

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With its topicality, “Any Day Now” has become the flagship series of Lifetime. Yet despite a loyal fan base and its success with critics, “Any Day Now” has yet to become a breakout hit. The 1991 NBC drama series “I’ll Fly Away,” filmed in Atlanta and set at the dawn of the civil rights movement, experienced similar difficulties. Though critically acclaimed, it was never able to lure significant audiences and was canceled after two seasons. Miller concedes that some audiences are slow to embrace the series because the topic of race is still too risky with the mainstream.

“Thirty-five years ago, we were in the middle of all of this hell [desegregation], and that’s not a long time ago,” she says, “but it’s way overdue to put all this behind us. As a country, we have so much healing to do, and we don’t know how to do it.

“You know what, you should talk about this--you can laugh and make jokes, but you’ve gotta talk.”

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The “It’s Not Just a Word” episode of “Any Day Now” airs March 18 at 9 p.m. on Lifetime.