Cougar Town

Regular viewers of ABC's Wednesday night comedy hit "Cougar Town" will feel their lips curl into wry smiles when they read pre-premiere summaries of the show: The producers and writers originally conceived "Cougar Town" as the life and times of a forty-something divorcee intrepidly devoted to seducing younger men in a small Florida town. The early promos stress the small town's obsession with its high school football team, ironically The Cougars. The football theme arrived still-born, and the entire show might have hit the airwaves DOA except that Courteney Cox and "Scrubs"-creator Bill Lawrence had vision and courage to work a few miracle revisions. The whole "Cougar Town" crew rapidly realized, like Jules surveying a bar-full of mini-skirted matrons, "I know I'm one of them. I just don't feel like one of them." They wisely helped Jules morph into her authentic self. The younger boyfriend disappeared from "Cougar Town" after just a few episodes, and stories coalesced around Cox's character Jules, her teen-aged son Travis, and Jules's extended family"”her neighbours on the cul-de-sac, her co-workers in her real estate office, and her profligate ex-husband. While "Cougar Town" struggled to resolve its identity crisis, Lawrence's innuendo-rich dialogue and Cox's increasingly sophisticated delivery sustained the show. By the end of "Cougar Town's" first season, ratings alone offered ample testimony to "Cougar Town's" radical improvement as it held audiences in the half-hour after "Modern Family"; but the Hollywood Foreign Press sealed the deal, nominating Cox for a 2010 Golden Globe as Best Actress in a Comedy.

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