So much so, in fact, that Lauren Graham, who plays single mom Sarah Braverman on the NBC series, hopes that she’s not held up as a role model for real-life mothers.

“I don’t necessarily want anyone to want to be me as a mom on this show,” Graham says. “That’s what I like about her is that she’s really kind of doing things in a more haphazard way and isn’t always noble and doesn’t always make the right choice.”

Graham and her TV sister, Erika Christensen — whose character, Julia, has her own issues with motherhood — talked separately with Zap2it about their characters’ struggles and small wins and what to expect as the season moves along.

Where they’re coming from

Graham: What I’ve really enjoyed … is just finding the ways in which this character just continues to sort of feel like — it’s too strong to say, [bit] like a failure. But, you know, as opposed to maybe [her "Gilmore Girls" character] Lorelai Gilmore, who had a very sunny outlook on things, it’s been really interesting for me to play someone who is kind of shouldering a lot of baggage in terms of being disappointed about where she is in life.

Christensen: [Julia] is very scheduled and in her own words even a control freak; she’s very ambitious. I’m ambitious, but I’m super-easygoing. The example that always comes to mind is my former roommate, who’s one of my best friends — if it started to rain, she’d be like, “Oh my god, we have to get out of the rain, my shoes, my hair,” and I’d be like, “Whoohoo!” … Julia is the one who would want to get out of the rain. So I really enjoy letting her possess me and see how she feels about things. I think she’s pretty funny.

Where they’re going

Christensen: The second and third episodes were kind of revelatory for me, because the writers decided to just find ways to embarrass Julia. It brought out more of her good-intentioned, ill-fated foot-in-mouth kind of manner. Which is interesting because she’s extremely together at work, and you don’t tend to see her at work. She’s really good at what she does, and in that way she has a bit of a know-it-all sense about her. But when it comes to matters of the heart, she’s not a know-it-all. She tries and fails at things, and it’s pretty great.

Graham: Sarah is really struggling in her life and not in a great place and, you know, hasn’t reached her potential in a lot of ways. … The character I played in the past [was] sort of always winning in a way, and so this is someone who has much further to go to reach any of her dreams, and that was all appealing to me.

What’s coming up

Christensen: The big story [beginning with Tuesday's episode] is Julia’s daughter [Savannah Paige Rae] and husband [Sam Jaeger] meet a fellow mom at school who kind of all the sudden encroaches on my territory with both of them. The actress is fantastic — Erinn Hayes, she makes me laugh so much. As you can imagine, it’s just a horrible situation to be in, to realize you’re just losing your grasp on your family.

“Parenthood” airs at 10 p.m. ET Tuesday on NBC.

From Zap2It

IFC Films’ Lizzie Nastro negotiated the pact with Ben Weiss of Paradigm. “Mercy” will open Friday, April 30th at the IFC Center in NYC and Friday, May 7th at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles and be available nationwide on video on demand on Wednesday, April 28th.

The film follows Johnny Ryan (Scott Cann), a successful young romance novelist who doesn’t actually believe in love. When he meets the beautiful and mysterious Mercy (Wendy Glenn) at the launch party of his latest book, Johnny’s world is suddenly turned upside down. Shockingly, she is the only major critic who dislikes his book. A cynic by nature, Johnny becomes determined to find the depth that Mercy says he is lacking and, in the process, falls in love. He turns to his father (James Caan) for advice. “Mercy” explores the struggle of maintaining a relationship and the possibility of losing it all.

“More than a few American independent filmmakers have attempted to make films about the nature of love but ‘Mercy’ actually succeeds,” commented IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring in a statement. “It’s a beautifully crafted, truly romantic film that is going to get a lot of attention for Patrick Hoelck and continues to showcase the diverse talents of Scott Caan. We’re thrilled to be in business with them and look forward to getting this film out to the largest audience possible through all of our platforms.”

From Indie Wire

IGN TV: How would you describe Julia and her place in the family?

Erika Christensen: She’s the youngest of the four. She is the real overachiever, and she’s a bit of a know-it-all, because she’s very competent at work, and she thinks that translates to family, and it doesn’t translate to family. She’s a brilliant lawyer, and sometimes you can see that, you can see bits of that, but really she’s a control freak. And she’s beginning to learn that. This is the time in her life when she’s beginning to realize that. I’m really a control freak, and it makes things hard for me when things don’t go exactly as I’d planned them.

IGN: What’s her dynamic like with her kid? Do you think she has a handle on the whole parenthood thing?

Christensen: Noooooo. She adores her kids. And she’s adorable. [Referring to the actress who plays her daughter] I don’t know if you saw her. She’s so frickin cute. Her name is Savannah Ray.

She adores her kid, but it’s also a wake-up call because her child is five now, and it kind of just went by like that while she was focusing on her career. And it’s that classic struggle: career and family. She’s just realizing now that she’s missing out, and she needs to focus on her family, or it’s just gonna flash before her eyes.

IGN: What’s it like working with this impressive ensemble of actors?

Christensen: It’s silly how much we love this show. It’s like, we keep saying, “Is this wrong that we love coming to work every day?” This is stupid. We get along so well. Seriously, we hang out when we’re not at work. These actors, we really have found probably the common ground is our love of the show. Everybody seems to be really a team player, which is necessary when it’s an ensemble show.

IGN: You’ve got Jason Katims producing your show. I’m a huge fan of his work on Friday Night Lights, and the thing about that show is you feel the people are so believable. Is there a similar vibe with this as far as the portrayal of these characters?

Christensen: I certainly hope so. I’m a huge fan of the show as well, and obviously they’re our station [NBC], so we have that going for us. I think that stylistically it’s different. You know, the way that Friday Night Lights is shot very hand held, in focus, out of focus, in light, out of light. It’s that documentarian feel. This is a little more polished, so it won’t have quite the sense of immediacy, I think, stylistically. But yeah, the writing is that kind of real interaction. And the actors are so good. I’m so proud that these are the people that ended up on the show. And we are, a lot of us, are fairly obsessed with Friday Night Lights. So I think we’re happy to be associated with it, and we want to try and capture a bit of that spontaneity. Recently we’ve started shooting faster, which I know they do.

IGN: Having done film and TV, do you have a preference, or does it even come to mind? Is there something about it that feels different?

Christensen: It’s definitely different living with a character longer. It’s its own thing. It’s a very finite story in a movie; they go through that certain arc, and then, with a play — which I don’t have a lot of experience with and I’d like to — you live with the character a long time, but it’s the same material. This is kind of both, where you’re living with the character a long time, but it’s an ever-changing story, and you can kind of grow up in this parallel universe. And I think that’s really cool and really interesting, artistically.

As far as television goes, though, I actually really want to be doing television right now. I just decided a year ago that I wanted to go there. And there was awesome material there, and I’m just one of those people; I don’t like vacations. I would rather be working. It keeps me alive and interesting and gives me a reason to live. So I was like, “OK, this can be really cool. I wanna do the series.” And I just couldn’t be happier.

IGN: Was it interesting meeting your TV daughter and bonding with her?

Christensen: Yeah, the side effects of having taken forever to actually get this show going is that we’ve known each other for a long time now, and our relationship has developed a lot since the pilot. So that’s really cool. And now she’s so frickin cute, and she goes, “Even though you’re my pretend mom, I love you.” And I’m like, “I love you too! Oh my gosh! You’re my pretend daughter, but I love you!” It’s just the openness of children. And she’ll tell me things. You know, “I fell off a boat, and I swam to an iceberg,” or something. And I’m like, “Really? OK.” Kids are awesome. She’s a really wonderful little actress. She’s six years old, and she’s a regular on a television series. Kind of a crazy responsibility, but she loves it. Somebody asked her on set the other day, “Would you rather be here or in school?” And she was like, “Here.”

From IGN

The show’s imperfect Braverman family is comprised of patriarch Zeek (Nelson), his wife Camille (Bonnie Bedalia), their kids: Adam (Krause) and his wife Kristina (Monica Potter), Julia (Christensen), Sarah (Lauren Graham) and Crosby (Shepard).

What do you like most about Julia so far and what they’ve done with her?
I find her personally funny. She’s trying so hard and she’s extremely competent at work, and that doesn’t necessarily translate to the home life. The writers have been having a blast embarrassing her – I mean, major foot-in-mouth moments, which is really fun. She’s clearly neurotic and high strung, and that’s a character I don’t feel like I’ve played. I certainly haven’t played a corporate lawyer/wife and mother before.

You don’t have any kids. Is it odd for you to play a working mother when you can’t relate in that sense?
I don’t think odd is the word but it’s definitely something very specific that, as with an actor playing any specific thing that they are not a part of in real life, it warrants a lot of respect and attention paid to it. I’m beginning to experience the relationship with my “daughter” growing. Her name’s Savannah Rae and she is 6, and our relationship now is a lot different than it was when we first started shooting the pilot. A lot of my friends have kids of various ages, and 6 years old is a lovely age. There’s still a huge amount of openness, and the “cool factor” hasn’t really entered into the equation yet, and I like that. I wish everyone was like that.

NUP_138202_1001Did you talk to your own parents about how they did it to get into more of a mindset, or other parents around you?
I didn’t speak to my parents about it because I feel I have a sense of how they did it from being on the set of it. [Laughs] The actor who plays my husband, Sam Jaeger, does have kids, and he and his wife are awesome parents, which I’ve been privy to a little bit and is super cool. Just looking into the amount of love and the kind of fierceness of the love that a parent feels for their child – and especially a mother feels for their child – is what I’ve gotten from my friends. And just the amount of humor that comes out of it, too, the way kids are so open and unrestrained and uncensored in the way that they talk and express themselves. They’re also completely learning things newly for the first time and, oh my gosh, my friends’ kids are hysterical. That’s the kind of thing that we’re mining on the show.

You’ve had a decently long career for someone who’s 27, but you haven’t done a lot of comedy.
That’s true. I’d say the film that I’ve done that’s “the one” — the closest to being a comedy but it’s also half comedy, half tragedy — is The Upside of Anger, one of my favorite films. Other than that, I did a bunch of sitcom work starting out here and there, and I did a pilot, but it hasn’t been the overall focus of the work that I’ve done. I’m really interested in going further in that direction. I have a lot of respect for funny, because funny means smart. My co-star Dax Shepard does standup as well as act, and that’s unbelievable to me. If you’re not in it, as he and everyone who’s in that crowd are, that must have to be the most terrifying experience ever! I can’t even fathom it! But again, I respect it immensely and everything that’s ever been said about laughter is trite and so true. It’s a part of life that you really don’t want to miss out on, so I have to get involved in it more.

Was going to television a calculated movie after doing movies for a good six years straight?
Part of it was ambition, and part of it was just the simple fact that the more I work, the happier I am. If I do three movies in a year, that could total working six months out of the year. I’m just happier being engaged in something and being productive.

Has being a series regular changed your off-screen lifestyle?
It’s mainly a viewpoint that has changed. On a film, it’s an intensive experience, it’s finite, you commit all the way and then it’s over. I’ve settled into the idea of this as a lifestyle. This is my life, an ongoing thing: Some days I work, some days I don’t. It’s a mindset where I’m pacing myself. I feel like I’m in it for the long run, and that’s a very different feeling. It allows me to interact socially more and be open to doing an interview in the morning, whereas a lot of the time if I’m doing a film and it’s a sprint, I completely shut off from the outside world and anyone I’m not working with I don’t talk to. A lot of actors do that. That’s one of the big differences as well: “OK, I can’t do that forever. I have to engage in the rest of life as well as working.”

Do you want to go back to film, maybe on your next hiatus, or are you content just doing TV?
I’m not totally sure. Dax is one of my best friends, and we were just talking about this the other day. He was going, “I don’t care! I don’t need to do another movie! I am happy as a clam to be on this show!” This first hiatus, I’ll probably lean in that direction. This is my focus, I want to make this as great as possible, and will likely have quite a short hiatus this year because we started so late. Assuming we get picked up for the second year, it would be two months or something. That said, I love, love, love to work. And despite all the complaining we do about not enough great material, there’s great material out there! And if given the opportunity, I likely will take it.

From USA Weekend

Here’s the story of a lovely family, the Bravermans, a clan carved from the Nancy Meyers book of design of pretty homogeneity: lots of lights, lots of whites. They undergo the trials and tribulations expected thanks to such fellow extended-family romps as “Brothers and Sisters” and “Modern Family”: surly smoking teens, disastrous dates with former high school crushes, helicopter parenting, working-mom’s guilt.

The show revolves around the three grown Braverman children and their offspring; the grandparents are so lively and virile that Grandpa keeps a box of condoms in his desk drawer. This is a family so intertwined that they can — and do — drop everything at a moment’s notice to race off to a little league ballgame.

Yes, there are the eye-rolling bits. But “Parenthood’s” secret weapon is its vibrant cast members, many of whom have at least one long-running TV series on their resumes. There’s Craig T. Nelson as the overbearing paterfamilias, Peter Krause as the family lightning rod and black sheep Lauren Graham (replacing Maura Tierney), who has moved into her parents’ home with her kids. This trio alone is worth the price of admission, being among the most expressive, charming, wide-ranging TV stalwarts working today. Setting them up as show gatekeepers makes “Parenthood” instantly likable.

Nonetheless, the pilot is a jumble of interrelated half plots, with a tone that veers wildly from only-in-a-sitcom situation (one son reluctantly agrees to father a child with his girlfriend, then a moment later learns he’s already got one with an ex — d’oh!) to facile dramatic pauses (Krause’s son’s evident learning disability earns virtual instant acceptance by all generations).

Clearly, “Parenthood” needs room to grow. But there are genuinely funny and touching moments — Graham tells her mother, “I’ve just got some financial trouble and two degenerate kids.” Sounds about right. Even if much of the show is pretty fantasy — like those lights strung up over the picnic table that perfectly fits the entire extended family — the Bravermans’ story is one everyone can get into. “Parenthood,” like the experience itself, is an evolving tale, and one worth watching.

From Reuters

You can see all the new photos I have added by clicking on the thumbnails below…

The one-hour dramedy, from the creative dream team of writer/producer Jason Katims (‘Friday Night Lights’) and producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer (‘Arrested Development’) will debut in a post-’Chuck’ slot on Monday, March 1 at 9PM (this is after both the ‘Heroes’ season finale on Feb. 8 and the Winter Olympics have aired).

The show, an update on the 1989 movie of the same name, follows the Braverman family and its four grown siblings as they commiserate on the present-day ups and downs of raising children. The show boasts an all-star cast that includes Peter Krause, Lauren Graham, Dax Shepard and Erika Christensen as the siblings, with Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia as their parents.

While originally slated for a fall premiere, ‘Parenthood’ had to be pushed back when Maura Tierney, who was supposed to play single mother Sarah, was forced to drop out of the series in order to receive breast cancer treatments. In October, it was announced that the role will instead be played by Graham, in her first TV series since ‘Gilmore Girls.’

From Inside TV