‘ODD’ IS IN HER FAVOR
In new series, momzillas prowl Upper Beast Side
Anywhere but the Upper East Side, this “odd mom” would be normal. In a world where everyone has more money than God, where size 4 is considered chunky and where preschoolers cram for kindergarten interviews, Jill Weber is the freak. She blithely refuses to be one of the primates of Park Ave. who populate Bravo’s first scripted half-hour comedy, “Odd Mom Out.”
Star and executive producer Jill Kargman knows the territory firsthand — she grew up near Madison Ave. and 66th St. and still lives in the neighborhood with her three kids.
“No matter what town you are in, there is some social order and a different yardstick to chart,” says Kargman. “In New York, people create things like schools and speaking languages and second homes. I don’t think it is that cartoonish. There are elements that are insane yet real, (like the fact that) girls leave the house looking like whores with bondage dresses and 6-inch stilettos,” only to have their mothers later profess to be shocked about seventh-grade hookups.
Like Kargman, the fictional Jill Weber has three children and makes jokes about what birthing
them did to her body. Still, she looks fabulous in person and on the show — including when her character strips down to her underwear for dance parties with her kids.
That’s not the only way she’s the atypical neighborhood mommy. She also commits food felonies by happily eating carbs, even though her mother-in-law, Candace (Joanna Cassidy), and sister-in-law, Brooke (Abby Elliott), all but tackle waiters to block Jill from scarfing bread.
That’s also a running gag in the first three episodes, as Brooke is desperate to hide her fourth pregnancy.
“She is ready to pop, but she never shows she is eight months pregnant,” says Elliott, who looks as if she has wiggle room in a size zero.
Growing up in Wilton, Conn., Elliott knew plenty of women like her character, “the quintessential momzilla, Upper East Side lady.”
“She probably considers herself a great mother because her kids are at the best schools. Yet she spends no time with them. I hope she can connect with her children at some point, but she probably won’t,” says Elliott — the only second-generation “Saturday Night Live” alum, thanks to her dad, Chris Elliott’s, run on the comedy show in 1994.
Brooke confides in Jill throughout the series because “(Jill) is so different than the other mothers on the Upper East Side.”
To prep for the role, Elliott says, she “tried to get inside this lady’s head, how seriously she takes herself and how insecure she really is.”
“Walking around the Upper East Side ... you see these ladies cutting you in line to get a juice, coming from SoulCycle, and they don’t care if you are in their way,” she says. “With their strollers, they will mow you over.”
In the pilot, the humorless headmaster of the preschool has nothing but disdain for Jill, who isn’t like other UES moms.
Some of the neighborhood’s wacky excesses were too outlandish even for a sitcom. Kargman knows people with $500,000 “safe rooms in townhouses in case of a zombie apocalypse.”
And she says she knew people who were so obsessed about getting their children into the right school that they dug up a hereditary link to a 16thcentury Austrian duke — even though the discovery required them to re-monogram all the napkins and towels to accommodate the new “von” before their surname. It becomes a plot point in episode two.
Living on the moneyed Upper East Side wasn’t always this way, according to Kargman.
“I grew up in the ’80s (amid) all of this wealth,” she says, recalling the land of servants and trust funds during an era when wealth whispered.
“It was a little more down to Earth, and fashion wasn’t what it is today — more ostentatious branding and in-your-face conspicuous consumption.”
She might not have turned out normal — or in this case, the odd mom out — if it wasn’t for grounded parents and TV.
“I was never a slut or a junkie,” she says. “We watched ‘Miami Vice’ every Friday night and ordered in Chinese food, and my dad would say, ‘Drugs ruin lives.’ ”
She says parents are the key, of course, because kids notice everything — like when Kargman’s own 3-year-old daughter asked her, “Why are you the only mom without red bottoms on your shoes?”
Having worked on this show for two years, Kargman says she’s thrilled with the results. She credits her fellow executive producers, Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky, who know something about making shows about Manhattan women, having worked on “Sex and the City.”
The new show, says Brooklynite Rottenberg, gives her and her writers “a chance to plumb more stories from the city, which, as we all know, is endlessly pliable for its heightened sense of wealth and pecking order and competitiveness.”
And cursing! On the show, Kargman peppers her dialogue with sexual references.
“It is ballsy and uncensored and we really can say anything, because Bravo is giving us freedom to say everything except ‘f---’,” Kargman says. “Ultimately, it is a love letter to New York.”
“Odd Mom Out” debuts on Bravo on June 8 at 10 p.m.
jacquelinecutler@verizon.net
Her kids are at the best schools. Yet she spends no time with them.