'Soul Food' enters third season

LOS ANGELES - Three years for any television series is considered a decent run. For one like Showtime's "Soul Food," it's a miracle.

The lifespan of dramatic shows with predominantly black casts, such as "Under One Roof" with James Earl Jones in 1995 and the medical series "City of Angels" in 2000, usually is measured in months.

"Soul Food" has the advantage of a cable home that doesn't require the broadcast networks' mass audience, but its survival remains impressive. Series creator and executive producer Felicia D. Henderson suggests she's learned from the past.

Her approach• Be serious, but also funny ("I think that's important in any show"). Portray black life accurately but relate universal stories. And don't try to write the book on being a minority in America.

"You have a lot of pressure to try to show everything, to cover the entire black experience and all that we go through," she said in an interview from Toronto, where the series is filmed.

That doesn't make for good drama, or realism. Neither does focusing too intently on race, Henderson said.

Being black is "not all we are, all the time. ... Like I get up every day saying 'Oh, what should I do as a black woman today?' That's not anyone's life."

"Soul Food," based on the 1997 movie of the same name, is about the closely intertwined lives of three attractive sisters in Chicago. Henderson, with five sisters herself, knows the terrain.

Teri (Nicole Ari Parker) is an ambitious, emotionally fragile lawyer. Homemaker Maxine's (Vanessa Williams) marriage has been undermined by suspicions of infidelity. Baby sister Bird (Malinda Williams) is a hairdresser whose fortunes, and those of her ex-con husband Lem, are on the rise.

"Everything you were comfortable with and thought you knew about the characters last season, throw that all out the window," Henderson said. "Change is a-coming on all fronts."

Although the majority of the "Soul Food" audience is black, cast member Malinda Williams is proud the series demonstrates broader appeal.

"When I run into people on the street, there's always somebody who identifies strongly with at least one of the characters. And that isn't just people of color, which is the beauty of it," she said.

"I don't think people see us as a black family. They just see us as a family."

The third season opens tonight with Faye Dunaway in a recurring role as a powerful woman who makes a difference in Teri's professional life.

"What we've never seen for Teri, the hard-nosed young woman, is someone else like her who could mentor her, who could be like her and be successful" in a man's world, Henderson said.

She wanted to give the character hope, the producer said. Is it possible some might fault her for giving Teri a white instead of a black role model• Henderson says she is unconcerned.

"I never think about that, to be honest. And that's not to say that people don't tell me 'Oh, you can't have Lem do that. That's not a positive black role model.'

"That's not my goal. I'm not trying to be all things to all people," she said. "That's not good storytelling. I have no interest in such storytelling."

It's richly textured tales of relationships that are the show's bread and butter. Henderson writes or rewrites each script and sometimes makes time to direct - and not just because she's attached to her words, she said.

"I know the actors. I know how to motivate them. When I'm just the producer, if you will, I'm trying to describe and define and explain to the director what we're trying to do.

"And so many times you want to say, 'Just get out of the way. I'll do it myself!'" Henderson says, her soft voice rising and then quickly subsiding into laughter. "But that's not quite right, is it?"

She's confident of one policy regarding directors: Assignments go to the women and minorities who are chronically underemployed in TV and film, as well as to white men.

"Because the show features people of color, that's important to me behind the scenes as well. ... It's something in the forefront of my mind, which it might not be if I were a white male."

With support from a program for inner-city students, "Soul Food" also has provided internship opportunities with its Los Angeles-based writing staff, Henderson said.

She dares to envision more. Maybe the series will prove to the broadcast networks there is an audience for a well-executed black drama.