Cinderella story unfolds behind scenes of network TV

CBS

Ellen Burnstyn(left), Heather Paige Kent and Paul Sorvino star in ‘That’s Life’, a show created by former New Jersey resident Diane Ruggiero.

Here's a story of an underdog nice girl who isn't finishing last.
   Our setting is the entertainment industry, which is almost like a foreign subdivision in Southern California; you have to speak Hollywood-ese and know all the fabulous people and be Goldie's daughter or Hoffman's son to get anywhere. Most of the time.
   Diane Ruggiero came to La La Land last year, and she is one of us. Her story is inspiring and real and down-home in the world of entertainment, where everyone knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody.
   Ruggiero created the CBS freshman series "That's Life" (7 p.m. Saturday), which features Lydia (Heather Paige Kent), a thirtysomething New Jersey bartender who ditches her blue-collared fiancée and enrolls in college. The series has proven to be consistently endearing and imaginative, and it has breathed new and fresh air into CBS's mostly stale programming.
   True-blue Jersey girl
   "That's Life" is similar to Ruggiero's former life; she was born and raised a true-Giants-blue Jersey girl, and after high school, she found herself floating from job to job. One year she worked 15 different jobs, but mostly she waited tables and tended bar, hustling money to support her habit: writing. Similar to her alter ego Lydia, Ruggiero tried to do the whole college thing, but the financial strains were too much and she didn't graduate.
   As any good waitress does, Ruggiero got to know her regular customers, and one of them was accomplished playwright Mark St. Germain ("Forgiving Typhoid Mary"). One day she offhandedly mentioned that she liked to write, and her new friend immediately withheld tips until he saw proof of this newly discovered talent.
   Weeks passed and she brought him a 10-page screenplay treatment. He loved it and wanted more, so he set her up on a writing schedule and she eventually gave him additional pages.
   He finally tipped her. And got her an agent.
   Life flew from there. Filmmaker Nora Ephron ("When Harry met Sally," "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail") was interested, and a production company bought the rights to Ruggiero's cutesy Ephron-esque screenplay about a writer suffering writer's block to a suicidal juncture - but the writer can't kill herself because she can't write the suicide note.
   First of many feats
   "That was the first thing that I've ever completed," Ruggiero said of the feature script. "It took me a year to write 10 pages and then 2 months to write the rest of it. And with the pilot (of "That's Life"), I had like four months to write it, and now every time you get the script you have five days to write it. In the beginning it took me so long and was so tedious and there were all these all-nighters."
   It took her a month to write the second episode of the hour-long drama, and after that she moved to L.A. where CBS presented her with an order for more "Life." It was a giant step for Ruggiero, because previous to her feature film, all she had written were sporadic short stories and small plays.
   "When I got my job (at CBS), the best part was it said writer in quotes on my check stub," she said. "And when you fill stuff out at the bank or the doctor, you have to write out writer as your job - no more waitress, no more student, no more full-time loser."
   Now Ruggiero's fulfilling her dream of writing. She's paid to write, and she's one of the few head writers on TV who turns out a consistently good product. But the transition from working class East Rutherford to trendy L.A. hasn't been the easiest of moves.
   Starved for attention
   Cosmopolitan L.A. is one of the most attractive cities in the country, but at the same time it's an ulterior universe of its own. Darren Star, creator of NYC-based "Sex and the City," made fun of L.A. last season by writing a Californian character who, while out at a steakhouse, chews his steak and savors its juices, but then spits the meat back neatly into his napkin and reaches for another pseudo-bite.
   Their exteriors look great, but internally they're starved for not only protein but also attention. Although Ruggiero has been subscribing to a strict diet, she indulged in a dangerously creamy pasta dish when we met for lunch on the Paramount Studios lot. ("It's fattening and it's full of carbohydrates - I'm in love with it," she said. "It's ridiculous and crazy. Probably sometime tonight, someone will come to my house and arrest me for having this meal.")
   The pressure to be thin is insane at times, she said. When Ruggiero first came to L.A., she wore a size 13, and many of the stores didn't even carry her size. Since moving to L.A., she's lost 25 pounds often hangs out with her star Heather Paige Kent.
   The rest of Ruggiero's cast credits read like a dream team of able actors who blow most other TV casts off the screen. Paul Sorvino ("Goodfellas") plays the father and Oscar-winning (and nominated again this year) Ellen Burstyn ("Requiem for a Dream") plays the mother.
   Ruggiero is making it in L.A., and although the future of her life and "Life" are in question - she's doesn't know yet if the series will be picked up for another season - she's confident affairs will work out. And in the rare event that they don't, Ruggiero's extensive work history will surely be expanded upon.
  

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