On her character Angela Martin, the cold, unforgiving worker on the office Debra Messing isn’t starting over exactly in The Starter Wife. The risk-taking, occasionally risque satire about a Hollywood divorcee rebooting her social life after being cast aside by her rich, self-absorbed TVproducer husband is a world removed, though, from her last gig as Grace in the long-running sitcom Will&Grace.

In the seminal, groundbreaking sitcom Messing called home for eight years, she played single, straight interior designer Grace Adler, best friend to Will Truman, a gay lawyer looking for love and a comfortable life in the big city.

Messing no longer plays the best friend. In The Starter Wife, she’s the centre of attention as Molly Kagan, a struggling writer of children’s books who finds herself divorced and forced to scrape by without the comfy settlement she’d always expected, and believed was her right.

“This is so different from my last experience,” Messing said. “In the miniseries, Molly’s life begins again, really. The mini-series was kind of like summer, and now school begins. It’s about how she feels about her new love life, about entering the Hollywood world and trying to make a living, and interacting with (her) ex-husband much more than she expected.”

Molly’s ties to her ex-husband are hard to break, because they share a seven-year-old daughter and because he’s a power broker, kingmaker and decision maker in the very world she’s trying to break into as a fledgling scriptwriter, now that she’s on her own.

Being dumped unceremoniously and without warning is a situation many once-married women have found themselves in, Messing said.

“What was most surprising to me, after the miniseries, was how many women would come up to me, and not just in Los Angeles,”Messing said. “I would be in airports in the middle of the country, and women would come up and say, ‘I’m a starter wife.’ It was validating. It was validating to see it really is as universal as we thought it might be, even though our story is specific to Hollywood.

“I think a lot of these women feel like, ‘Wow, I’ve never been represented before. There’s never been a TV show or movie about this phenomenon.’ I think it makes them feel like they’re not alone, and yet, we can have a lot of fun with it.”

There will be pitfalls and missteps along the way, but life will work out for Molly in the end, Messing said.

Messing doesn’t want to think about The Starter Wife’s life beyond the current season, though.

“Oh, gosh, I can’t speak to that now,” she said. “Every time I’ve tried to guess what I would be doing, or even feel like doing, six months from now, I’ve always been wrong. So my credo is to not even try to predict what will happen and just make the best show we can and have as much fun as we can, and hope that people respond as well as they did to the miniseries. Who knows? It might turn into geriatric Hollywood. We all might be going into the movie version as seniors. You never say never.”

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