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Friday September 14, 2007

Jewish producer is show’s ‘Saving Grace’

by curt schleier
correspondent

Imagine, if you will, Denis Leary as a woman. Now stay with me. Then imagine this woman on “Touched by an Angel.” And there you have the basic ingredients of “Saving Grace,” the hottest new cable show of the summer — and the third-highest premiere ever for an ad-supported cable network.

The show, which airs on TNT, stars multiple-award winner Holly Hunter as Grace Hanadarko, a cynical and tortured Oklahoma City detective who tries to escape her demons through promiscuity and booze.One evening, preoccupied trying to shift the gears of her Porsche and at the same time balance her buddy Jack Daniels, she hits and kills someone. Grace jumps out of the car and tries to revive the victim. When that fails, she asks God for help. That’s when the angel appears.

He’s a tobacco-chewin’, last-chance angel named Earl (Leon Rippy), who is here to redeem her. The fatality was imaginary, a chance for Grace to turn her life around.

If that sounds like it has the makings of a Christian show, you might not want to mention it to Artie Mandelberg, an executive producer and frequent director. ‘‘Saving Grace’’ is about faith, he says, irrespective of religion. “It’s really important to us that this is not a religious show,” he says.

In fact, one show regular, a prisoner on death row, converts to Islam this season. In another, a scene that was originally intended to take place at the pearly gates was moved because not every religion believes in heavenly gates, pearly or otherwise.

Buoyed by its early success, the creative team is already at work on a story arc for next season in which Grace dates a Jewish man. “She will take the stereotypes and turn them on their sides,” Mandelberg says. “I’m sure she’ll go to synagogue with him, and want to explore his faith with him.”

Mandelberg, 55, is uncomfortable when he’s called the show’s Jewish conscience. “That’s overstating it,” he claims. “I’m not the show’s Jewish guardian. [Creator] Nancy [Miller] comes to me whenever she has a question about Jewishness. If I know the answer, I answer. If not, I refer her to someone who does.”

But, he adds, “in a sense I guess I am the Jewish voice, because that’s who I am and where I came from.”

Miller and Mandelberg first worked together on an short-lived show called “Leaving LA.” They stayed in touch, and a number of years ago Miller came up with the idea for a show.

“We would talk all the time,” Mandelberg recalls. “She’d say, ‘I really want to do this idea I have about a reluctant saint.’ We’d talk and talk and talk, and the reluctant saint eventually turned into ‘Saving Grace.’”

Mandelberg grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, the child of Holocaust survivors. His mother was from Czechoslovakia; his father was Polish and was moved to 12 different camps during the war.

He remembers attending weekly Friday evening and Saturday morning Shabbat services. “I was fairly religious,” Mandelberg notes.

But he had no clear career path. “I was futzing around. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I took a TV course, and I just loved it. The pace. The energy.”

After graduation Mandelberg took a succession of increasingly responsible jobs, starting as a page — that’s a nice way to say usher — for CBS in New York, all the way up to editing the pilot for “Moonlighting.”

The producers wanted him to stay on to edit, but he felt that was a dead-end job. So in exchange for staying on as a supervising editor, he was given a producer’s title and allowed to direct episodes. It was, he says, “where my career really started.”

Mandelberg is still observant — though not as much as he was growing up. He sends his daughter to Hebrew day school, and he already has her bat mitzvah date — April 24, 2010.

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