These days, there’s no fear of commitment for Finnigan
Her big eyes sparkle, her rosebud mouth blossoms into a lopsided smile. Who wouldn’t be charmed by Marni Fliss, the goofy sylph on NBC’s new romantic sitcom “Committed”?
Not that you’d want to date her. She’s a wacko. As portrayed by Jennifer Finnigan, she’s an impossibly upbeat flibbertigibbet who speaks in an unfiltered stream of consciousness and gets counseling from Buddha88, an online shrink.
Her Greenwich Village sublet came furnished with a retired clown, but that’s just fine with Marni: From his home in a walk-in closet, the clown, played by Tom Poston, supports Marni’s theory that “everyone’s got clowns in their closet.”
She’s settling into her new relationship with her perfectly mismatched soul mate, Nate Solomon, a phobic math genius who shelters his fevered brain with a low-impact job as a record store clerk.
Marni and Nate (played by Josh Cooke) have taken their place as TV’s latest loopy lovebirds. But there’s a difference: Unlike such predecessors as Dharma and Greg, Diane and Sam, Lucy and Ricky, neither one has the edge on kookiness. Equally unstable in the extreme, they have found validation and comfort in the other.
“Rather than seeing Nate’s neuroses as craziness, she sees them as brilliance,” marvels Finnigan.
“She’s nutty and free-spirited and honest,” she says of her character. “She has a childlike innocence, the way she looks at the world.
“But there’s much more going on under the surface. This is probably so contrary to what the writers think, but I like to imagine that she’s got a lot of sadness in her and that a lot of her behavior comes out of denial.”
An early phobia steered Finnigan into acting. “I was so shy as a kid,” says the 25-year-old Montreal native, the daughter of an airlines reservation agent and a radio personality.
“Then, when I was 12, I joined a community theater group, and it was amazing how in that hour of class I was an extrovert. As soon as I got back to real life, I couldn’t get up in front of a class of 20 without sweating. Initially, that’s why I kept acting: It was freeing, so freeing.”
As a teen, Finnigan found success on Canadian TV. Then she headed to Los Angeles, where for four years on the CBS soap “The Bold and the Beautiful” she played Bridget Forrester, a good girl whose many woes included her mother’s pregnancy by Bridget’s own husband.
Last season, she played a pathology resident, Dr. Devan Maguire, on the NBC crime drama “Crossing Jordan.”
Then she read for “Committed” but felt nervous about doing a comedy.
“When I found out they wanted me to come back, I called my agent and said, ‘I gotta meet this guy they hired to be Nate.’ I did it behind everyone’s back. We met for crepes. He had an accident on his motorcycle – some fender-bender thing – so he was late.
“Then, when he sat down, I decided to be in character. So I assumed the part of Marni, which I think he found very weird and strange. But he was so sweet, and we had a really nice time.”
The birthday bunch
Singer-songwriter Bobby Goldsboro is 64. Actor-director Kevin Costner is 50. Country singer Mark Collie is 49. Actress Jane Horrocks (“Absolutely Fabulous”) is 41. Comedian Dave Attell (“Insomniac”) is 40. Actor Jesse L. Martin (“Law & Order”) is 36. Rapper DJ Quik is 35. Singer Jonathan Davis (Korn) is 34. Singer Christian Burns (BBMak) is 32. Actor Jason Segal (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Undeclared”) is 25. Singer Samantha Mumba is 22.