‘Temporarily Yours’ Star Insists On Dialectal Permanence

Despite having previously co-starred in two series, Debi Mazar admits to having worried about top-lining her own sitcom.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to express myself, that they’d take away my vernacular,” Mazar said. That vernacular is unmistakably New York. Queens, N.Y., to be exact.

Mazar, a native of the borough, has just come back to the tube as the star of “Temporarily Yours,” a sitcom about Deb DeAngelo, who has quit her job, moved out of her father’s home and into a great apartment, and is making her living working temp jobs.

“I really wanted to be able to speak the way I speak,” said Mazar, the streets in her voice resonating through the phone line.

And she got her way.

But still, despite her made-in-New York attitude and accent, and the show’s Manhattan setting, her goal, she said, was to present a character “accessible to everybody all over the country.” She also wanted character-driven, instead of joke-driven, comedy.

Whether she’s pulled all that off is a verdict viewers and Nielsen ratings will answer in the next several weeks.

“Temporarily Yours” airs Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. on CBS, directly following the network’s other distinctly Queens-flavored show, “The Nanny” (featuring the more nasal but less rough-edged only-from-outer-Gotham voice of star Fran Drescher).

“I didn’t want a show where I was stuck in an office,” Mazar said. “I knew about living in New York, just because it’s where I’m from. Like the struggle to pay your rent. A lot of things happen in the course of a day. I thought there’d be a lot of comedy this way.”

What made it to air isn’t quite the show originally presented to CBS. The network rejected the first pilot and ordered some retooling.

One result: Mazar’s on-air apartment went from a typically small city dwelling of the sort a temp could afford to a magnificent place only found in TV series.

That point notwithstanding, Mazar still feels good about the show. “I think it’s inspiring to see a single woman out there keeping her head above water,” she said. “It’s not a message show, but I think women will be inspired.”

Mazar became a familiar face and voice a few years back when she starred as the wisecracking secretary Denise Iannello on “Civil Wars” and then, minus an “n,” on “L.A. Law.”