By LOUISA CLEAVE
Actresses, it seems, are always the last to know.
Jennifer Garner has just finished filming the first series of Time of Your Life (TV3, 7.30 pm) - the Jennifer Love Hewitt spin-off to Party of Five - and says there are no plans to bring back the show.
"I don't know what happened because people really like the show but, at the same time, shows are going on and off the air so quickly. Fans are writing in trying to save it," Los Angeles-based Garner said yesterday.
Within seconds of hanging up, the show's American publicist had called back to tell us a second series was going ahead but Garner had not been told.
Good news, then, for those members of the Save Time of Your Life fan club and any potential recruits in New Zealand who had their first taste of the show last week.
Garner plays Romy, the wannabe actress flatmate of Hewitt's character Sarah. The pair are thrown together when Sarah turns up in New York to search for her biological father and realises she is also on a quest to discover herself.
The first episode saw Romy preparing to pack herself home to Middle America after giving herself a year to make it as an actress.
Garner, born in Houston and raised in West Virginia, knows the feeling of being a struggling actress waiting tables to make ends meet.
But she has also had her fair share of breaks in the industry, with a recurring role on Felicity and appearances in Spin City and Law and Order.
Her work on a short-lived series called Significant Others earned her the role on Time of Your Life.
Romy was written for her after the producers of Significant Others promised to keep Garner in mind for another show.
So she found herself working with Hewitt, one of Hollywood's hottest television and movie stars, not to mention also a producer, at the age of 24.
"She's incredibly professional," Garner says of Hewitt.
"I saw her flub a line just twice in 19 episodes. She is hysterically funny and she's so wise for someone as young as she is," says Garner, four years Hewitt's senior.
Perhaps because of Hewitt's star quality, Time of Your Life was not heavily marketed in the United States and so far only the first half of the show has screened there.
"The real meat of the show is in the last nine episodes. If you watch the first few episodes it doesn't gel until you get to the middle of the first season," Garner advises.
Lucky then - for viewers and for Garner - that it seems there will be a second round. Hope she has been told.
TV: Everyone knows except for the star
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