Nathan Lane Throws a Political Party

Four years after getting booed off stage as the star of the NBC sitcom Encore! Encore!, Nathan Lane is finally ready for his curtain call. CBS has elected the Tony-winner to play a freshman congressman in the midseason comedy Charlie Lawrence. And this time around, Lane insists, he got it right.

For starters, while Encore! cast the openly gay Birdcage thesp as — gasp! — a skirt-chasing opera singer, Lawrence finds Lane in more familiar territory. "He's an openly gay actor who ends up getting elected to Congress," the 46-year-old performer tells TV Guide Online. "I thought this was an interesting venue, to put a gay character into the world of politics."

In addition to starring in the series, Lane also serves as an exec producer and writer. In other words, if Lawrence is a flop, he has no one to blame but himself. "The first time around, I was terribly na&#239ve," he laments of the Encore! debacle. "For some reason, I got it into my head that I wanted to work with those particular producers from Frasier [Peter Casey and Suzanne Holmes], and I just wanted to be an actor and leave it all up to them. The next thing I knew, I was in the Napa Valley with Joan Plowright [playing my mother].

"So, this time around," adds the Nicholas Nickleby star, "I had to see a script. I can't just meet with high-powered writer-producers, and, because we hit it off at lunch, that means we're going to do a show together."

With seven episodes of the series in the can, Lane is optimistic that Charlie Lawrence will garner high approval ratings from the public — not to mention A.C. Nielsen — when it debuts in March. "It's a different kind of show for CBS," says the theater vet, who plans to recruit some famous ex-sidekicks (Robin Williams, Matthew Broderick) to drop in as guest stars. "People have said that this is almost risqué for [the network]."

Of course, the mere existence of a gay lead on a CBS show qualifies as bold. But unlike the sapphic character Ellen DeGeneres played on her short-lived comedy last season, Charlie Lawrence will not be all work and no play. "Of course he'll date," Lane insists. "[His personal life] will be prominent in the sense that, like any other human, he'll want to get together with others. In fact, the first episode I go out with [Dharma & Greg alum] Thomas Gibson. That's a good way to begin.

"But," he adds, "it's not a show about being gay. It's not Queer as Folk."