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In producing a new TV series, sometimes things go wrong. With “Love Bites,” the NBC comedy that ends its run Thursday, just about everything did. And Becki Newton, the Guilford actress who starred in the comedy, first unveiled as the lynchpin to last year’s fall season on NBC – only to be delayed until after the end of the TV season in the doldrums of summer – emerged intact.Though it all seems now very long ago.
“We filmed the pilot a year and a half ago, and went through as series of setbacks and delays,” Newton, 33, says over the phone from Atlanta, where her husband Chris Diamantopoulos is playing Moe in the Farrelly Brothers new “Three Stooges” movie.
One of the stars, Jordana Spiro, had to go back to her old series, “My Boys.” The show runner, Cindy Chupack, quit for personal reasons. Once unveiled as the lynchpin to NBC’s fall season last year, it was bumped to midseason when Newton also became pregnant with her first child.
“These kinds of delays happen to a show. There’s not a show where these kinds of things don’t happen, when a show doesn’t go through a lot of changes,” Newton says. “But not often does it all happen to one show.”
Newton’s condition meant her character had to be entirely rewritten.
“Originally my character was going to be a virgin,” Newton says. “When I became pregnant, they wrote in that I was a surrogate mother for my sister. But I have to say when we got our heads together, it made the character so much more interesting,” she adds. “If the show had more time to explore the characters, how she related with her sister after the birth would have been the kind of relationship I don’t think has been on TV before.”
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As much as we dig NBC’s rom-com anthology Love Bites, it’s time to face the facts: The romance isn’t destined to last beyond summer’s end. There’s been no official announcement, of course, but ratings are anemic, and odds are slim to none that NBC will extend the show’s run past its original nine-episode order. So what’s next on the agenda for Bites‘ charming star Becki Newton? First, she wants to get back in the game and land herself another series. And in the meantime, she has her undying devotion to former Ugly Betty costar Michael Urie to keep her occupied.
“Michael Urie and I harass each other via text all the time,” Newton says with a laugh. Sadly, there aren’t currently any rumblings about revisiting the twosome’s ah-mazing 2010 cabaret act, but the bubbly star does offer this tidbit: “Michael and I need to tackle some sort of performance art in the future. I’m not sure what it is, but we will be reteaming for the rest of our lives on various projects.” Win!
Now, about that other plan…
“I’ve discovered my love of sitcoms,” Newton tells TVLine. “There’s nothing specific lined up right now, but I did a pilot for CBS [titled Home Grown] which unfortunately didn’t get picked up. I had never done a mutli-cam show before, and I absolutely loved it.” Translation: “The next step will be to play a sassy role on a multi-cam show!” Newton says that “the live audience [on Home Grown] was pretty great. It reminded me of my days back in theater. It was so much fun to tackle a scene and if it didn’t work, the writers would fly in with new lines and you’d try that.”
The TV vet also calls her sitcom experience an “incredible challenge,” though one that actually made her long to venture further into the genre. “The hardest [part on a sitcom] is continuing when a line doesn’t work, and not completely falling apart,” she laughs. “On Ugly Betty, we’d run in, do a scene and try different things — and we knew when it was funny. In a sitcom setting, I walked in with a joke that I thought was the funniest thing I’d ever heard — and heard dead silence!”
Regardless of where Newton ends up, though, she says she’s always thinking of her old Betty counterparts. “I miss them all so much,” she says. “We all get together anytime we’re in the same place. They are my family and I really love them.”
For now, you can catch Newton in Love Bites on NBC Thursdays at 10/9c.
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