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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Living life backward


Fran Drescher and Ryan McPartlin appear in a scene from the new WB sitcom
Mike Hughes Gannett News Service

Fran Drescher has raced through all the usual phases of life. She hasn’t done it in the usual order, though.

“(I’m) living my life backwards,” Drescher says.

Early on, she was settled and married. Decades later she lived with a guy in his 20s.

That’s now mirrored in “Living With Fran,” a comedy premiering Friday night on the WB. Drescher, 47, plays Fran Reeves, an older woman living with Riley Martin (played by 29-year-old Ryan McPartlin), a guy barely older than her son.

An older woman living with a younger man isn’t so unusual, say several members of the show’s cast and crew.

“My mother is dating someone who is 23 years younger than her,” says Ben Feldman, who plays Drescher’s 21-year-old son, Josh. “I sort of came home into it.”

Jamie Kennedy, the actor-turned-producer, echoes that. He planned the show while recalling a friend, David Garrett, who was going through the same thing.

“David was 23 and he dated a woman who was 45. … She was a lawyer and she was like having parties with actors,” Kennedy says. “We’re in the hot tub … she was living her life backwards.”

At 21, Drescher dated her high school sweetheart, Peter Marc Jacobson. Together they breathed life into her former TV series, “The Nanny.”

They split in 1997 after almost 20 years of marriage. Then, for four years, she dated someone 16 years her junior.

The guy’s dad objected, Drescher says: “He cornered me in a room and said, ‘What are you doing with him? You should be with me.’ “

On some levels, Drescher says, she had no trouble dating a member of the younger generation.

“I’m very contemporary,” she says. “Most of my music and references are young. I did several projects for MTV.”

Still, there were bumpy parts halfway through the relationship – like learning her live-in boyfriend had kept his own apartment. That has inspired a “Living With Fran” episode.

“Of course, in the series he gives up the apartment … because our love is true,” she says. “In real life, he kept the apartment and now he’s back in it.”

While Hollywood often puts older men with younger women, the flip side is rare. Even the lawn-boy story line on “Desperate Housewives” involves an actress who in real life is only four years older than the actor.

Drescher, who is re-energizing her career after recovering from uterine cancer, and Kennedy combined their ideas on a comedy about an older woman and her younger man.

“He had the hook of having kids involved,” Drescher says, “which my idea didn’t have because I … was basing it off my story.”

Their ideas merged: Drescher and McPartlin’s characters are living with her 15-year-old daughter, Allison Reeves (relative newcomer Misti Traya). Then her son drops out of medical school and is startled by the changes at home.

The guest stars will be familiar. John Schneider (“The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Smallville”) and Marilu Henner (“Taxi”) play McPartlin’s parents. Charles Shaughnessy, Drescher’s boss-turned-husband on “The Nanny,” plays her ex-husband.

The regulars, however, are relatively new. Traya, who is playing a 15-year-old, is actually a Sarah Lawrence College grad. Feldman has done Broadway. McPartlin spent three years as Hank Peters on the “Passions” soap.

Ironically, his first job was in a “Nanny” episode.

“I had an affair with Grandma Yetta,” he says, “in a flashback.”