She and her gay ex-husband turned their unique relationship into a sitcom. Now in its second season, Happily Divorced is a whole new showcase for the Nanny star.
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It's been nearly 20 years since Fran Drescher made her debut as "the flashy girl from Flushing" on The Nanny. While the '90s sitcom lives on in reruns, Drescher has gone on to more work in both acting and activism. She now stars on Happily Divorced, a series she created alongside her ex-husband (and Nanny co-creator) Peter Marc Jacobson. Inspired by their lives, it's the story of a woman who learns her husband of 18 years is gay.
LP: Happily Divorced is a traditional sitcom in many ways, but it deals with less traditional subject matter.
FD: Yeah, I think that at this stage in my career, if I'm producing something, I'd like it to have some social value in addition to making people laugh.
LP: So many sitcoms now are single-camera -- what made you want to do another multi-camera show?
FD: You know, when you perform to a proscenium like a play, it's a completely different energy. You're working with a live audience. It's usually a much harder laugh. And that's my style of comedy. I like to strive toward big yuks and get an immediate audience reaction, and I'm used to working multi-cameras. I've worked single in film and done a little bit of TV with single, but I think that the tone of the single-camera comedy is completely different. I prefer the multi-cam, but I'm just happy that there's so many scripted comedies out there now. It's a nice change from all the reality.
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LP: How is Fran the character different from you?
FD: I'm not as dependent on my ex-husband in the way that Fran is. We're very, very close, and we're like family, and I would certainly call him first if I needed anything or anyone. Our lives aren't intertwined in the way that theirs are. They really haven't experienced being single in the way Peter and I have been able to, and I think that that helps make me a more well rounded person. It's hard to see where the marriage ended and the divorce began with them, because they're still living together. She needs a little distance to help define her as an individual outside of that relationship, and I've really carved that path for myself for many years already, so I don't need to prove anything to me or to the world.
LP: How do you manage to find humor in the less funny aspects of life -- divorce, for example?
FD: I think that that's part of what I do. I wrote the New York Times Bestseller Cancer Schmancer, and that had a lot of humor in it. It took me four drafts to do it successfully, but I did. I think that it's a challenge that is really cathartic. Of course, my situation with Peter really wasn't exactly like the character in the show, because he came out after we divorced, and that wasn't really why we divorced, and he was very opposed to the divorce. So it made it painful to me to do something that I wanted for me, but because he was so against it -- whereas in this show, he was the one who dumped his orientation on her, 18 years into the marriage. She actually was the one that had no choice. So it's a little bit different. She had more to get past than I did.