Emma Thompson in ‘Saving Grace’.

Holly Hunter has an angel on her shoulder – and boy, is she peeved about it.

In Saving Grace, premiering Monday, July 23, on TNT, the Oscar-winning actress makes her prime-time series debut as Grace Hanadarko, a driven Oklahoma City police detective who is very good at her job but whose personal life is a mess. She drinks heavily, smokes like a chimney and, at the moment, is carrying on a torrid affair with her handsome and very married partner, Ham Dewey (Kenneth Johnson, The Shield).

Things come crashing down around Grace one night when, after getting loaded at a bar, she hits a pedestrian while speeding in her car. Horrified, she stumbles from her car and, noting that her victim appears to be dead, Grace blurts out a desperate cry for help. And she gets it, embodied by a tobacco-chewing angel named Earl (Leon Rippy, Deadwood), who has been dispatched by God to help Grace clean up her act.

On paper, Saving Grace may look like an improbable combo platter of crime procedural and whimsical character study, but however you characterise the show, it was a project that grabbed Hunter’s attention even before she finished reading the pilot script.

A complete woman

“I never have read a series that I was interested in being a part of until this,” she says. “I got to page 10 and called my agent and said, ‘What is this? This is unbelievable!’ Unbelievable, that it would be written for someone with my experience and of my age. It was just a real woman who was unapologetically a complete woman, leading an extremely active life, sexually, professionally and personally. I thought that was galvanising, really.

“When I finished it, my first thought was, ‘God, I wish this was a feature,’ but then I thought that a feature would give it short shrift. You actually want to know more at the end, and it’s great to want to know more about a character and the world that she is in more completely.”

Hunter says she also found intriguing the way that Grace is almost an elemental force of nature in some respects, a woman who is unfettered by the constraints many in her age group may experience.

“Grace is living kind of unencumbered with a lot of the responsibilities that most women her age have accepted at that point: family, children, husbands,” the actress says. “She has consciously rejected those responsibilities, yet she still leads an encumbered life, because you can’t help it. Whenever you say ‘yes’ tosomething, you say ‘no’ to a bunch of other things. Her yeses and nos are very interesting to me.”

Despite the unconventional, even bizarre, central premise of her new TNT series, Hunter says she feels confident that Saving Grace will resonate with a large share of the TV audience. Grace is a prickly woman filled with an abundance of contradictions, yet, Hunter brings a fascinating specificity to this role in an utterly fearless, multifaceted performance, making Grace a character viewers can invest in and even relate to on some level.

Massive contradictions

“Everybody that I know, and people in general, are made up of massive, massive contradictions and polemics,” she says. “We live that way, even if we don’t talk that way, with incredible opposites. Some people may embrace their opposites more gracefully than others.

“The things that I am so attracted to in Grace are those opposites, and that she lives them in extremity. I relate to that, maybe not to the extremity, but to the origin, as I think all people do. I think people constantly are trying to contain their opposites in life. That’s why the self-help section at Barnes & Noble has grown to become, I think, the biggest section in the whole bookstore. People are trying to tame the beast within, with Ambien, Prozac, or booze, whatever there is. They are trying to anaesthetise the pain or curb their appetites, for food or whatever.”

Hunter is no snob when it comes to television, certainly. The medium has been very good to her, earning her Emmy Awards for The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom and Roe vs Wade, as well as three other Emmy nominations.

Still, Saving Grace is Hunter’s first foray into playing an open-ended character with no clearly defined arc based on a beginning, middle and end. That’s an adjustment for any actor, but Hunter says it helps that Grace creator Nancy Miller isn’t playing her cards too close to her vest.

Honesty and transparency

“Nancy is a woman of incredible honesty and transparency in terms of where the show is going,” Hunter says. “It’s a very openly run show. It’s not a covert operation where the cast is concerned. I know they want to keep storylines confidential, but we know stuff. We’re included in the mix.

“It’s not that I want to dictate where things are going, because that is not part of the attraction that I have for this. I am not a writer. I have ideas about things that I want to explore, and I let the writers know that. But this writing team is kind of remarkable. We’re on episode seven right now, and I absolutely love the scripts. They are full-bodied experiences, and I think all the other actors would agree with that. This has just been a fantastic creative experience so far.”

– John Crook, Zap2it