'Time of Your Life': The Power of Love

Funny, those weren't exactly the first two words out of the media's mouths this summer. The already high-profile series developed Is this show in trouble? syndrome after word leaked out that the pilot — an overearnest fable with scant secondary-character development — would need to be reshot. To some extent, Time was a victim of, well, timing: Fox chief Herzog had just replaced Peter Roth, who'd signed up Keyser and Lippman last summer to produce the show. Plus, the net's new thinking was that a punchier-paced version of the series would make the perfect companion piece for that other ultrasensitive-babe-against-the-big-city series, Ally McBeal. "Chris and Amy got caught in the middle of a transition in creative direction at the network," sums up Herzog. "We wanted to make [the show] a little more relevant, a little less whimsical and Dickens-like."

So Keyser and Lippman started rewriting (un)like the Dickens, spinning a more grounded tale about a ready-for-anything Sarah who waits tables at a karaoke bar, rooms with a wannabe actress (Jennifer Garner of Fox's short-lived 1998 Keyser/Lippman drama, Significant Others), and finds romantic potential in a struggling musician. (And not just any struggling musician — That Thing You Do!'s Johnathon Schaech, who'd been cast in another Keyser/Lippman pilot, Partners, a CBS cop drama that wasn't picked up for fall.) Throughout the Time tweaking, though, the goal of the show remained unchanged. "In PO5, there are a lot of people who talk about how they're feeling at any given moment and how they expect to feel later and how they may have felt," says Lippman. "One thing that's different about this series is that people do things instead of reflect on them. If PO5 is about trying to figure out how to move forward as a family, this is about that next phase in your life, where you figure out, 'Who am I independent of a family, and how do the friendships I make in the world turn into family-like relationships?'"

While the jury remains out on the new incarnation (the pilot was still being reshot at press time), Love is making one bold guarantee: "It's not just going to be a chick show — I won't let it be," insists Hewitt. "I'm not an extreme girlie girl. I'm a girl, definitely, but I'm not super-girlie. And it won't be sappy because New York is not a sappy place. I think the show is going to have a certain urban toughness to it. And we have a lot of really hot girls on the show. We'll make sure we show bellies and things like that, so the guys should be okay."

Frankly, if Hewitt appeared on TV holding up microchip-component diagrams for an entire hour, guys would be okay. "She's extraordinarily relatable," says Lippman. "She can be your best friend, she can be your girlfriend. Anyone can watch her and say, 'I really want to be like her. I'd love to look like her and dress like her, and at the same time, I understand her.'" And as Keyser points out: "She's really good with crews. Crew members are lining up to marry her. There are pretend weddings on the set."

No time for nuptials this season, though. In addition to headlining Time (which, by the way, she produces), Hewitt's producing and starring in ABC's upcoming Audrey Hepburn biopic. She'll play an obsessive record exec in this fall's big-screen comedy The Suburbans. She's about to start surfing lessons in preparation for a flick that her own production company will make, The Girl in the Curl. And she's mulling offers to record another album. So, Love, is there any other medium you plan on conquering? She pauses. "Miming," she offers thoughtfully. "I know a lot of people who might be quite happy if I was quiet for a while." Yeah, but they all work for competing networks.