Rebirth in the afternoon

ON a humid summer day in New York City, Rhonda Britten, a life coach on the syndicated daily reality series “Starting Over,” was in a boutique in SoHo. A stylishly dressed middle-aged woman approached her and said she was a fan of the show. Somewhat tentatively, she also said, “You’ve changed so many women’s lives.” Britten directed her full attention to the stranger. “Has it changed your life?” she asked. The woman paused and then simply answered, “Yes, it has.”

Britten is hardly the first celebrity to hear this kind of sentiment from a fan. But metamorphosis is what “Starting Over” -- which won a Daytime Emmy in May -- sets out to do with a kind of intensity TV usually steers clear of. On the show, broadcast weekdays at noon on NBC, six women at a time live together in an L.A. compound, each with the goal of drastic self-improvement. Under the authority of Britten and another life coach, Iyanla Vanzant, as well as Stan J. Katz, a psychologist, the housemates attempt to transform. They reunite with estranged family members, begin new careers and get out of relationship ruts. When one achieves her goal and leaves, another takes her place.

As current billboards for “Dr. Phil” tell us, “Changing lives is hard. Changing channels is easy.” Sure, sure -- but while a one-day boot camp with a bossy teletherapist like Dr. Phil McGraw might be fun to watch, it seems unlikely to forever alter anything. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” created the idea of better living through television 20 years ago, and the TV landscape is currently awash in altruistic premises. Yet at bottom, unscripted shows like ABC’s hit “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and Christian singer Amy Grant’s new NBC series, “Three Wishes,” rely on the notion of quick fixes and on dramatic, nearly pornographic, unveilings, while the likes of Dr. Phil assume we’ll buy the idea that you can overhaul lives in an hour.

It is “Starting Over’s” soap-operatic arcs, which unfold over months, that expose the show’s more radical ambitions. The series takes its traditionally soapy fodder -- relationship troubles, difficult personalities, feuds -- and instead of reveling in those problems, as daytime dramas do, “Starting Over” tries to get people to emerge from their wallowing into the bigger, wider world.

So the pleasure of watching the show comes from observing the women’s tiny movements in the right direction, as well as, admittedly, witnessing the inevitable setbacks that make “Starting Over” more like its other ancestor, “The Real World.” After all, “Starting Over” was created by Mary-Ellis Bunim, who died in January 2004 of breast cancer, and Jonathan Murray, both of whom were behind that pioneering MTV reality series. And if the show’s full-on commitment to the painstaking process of change has, inevitably, come along with a certain amount of behind-the-scenes turmoil, their theory about what was lacking in daytime TV has been borne out by the show’s year-over-year ratings increases. Last season, in the brutal syndication market, it drew an average of 1.4 million viewers each day, nearly half of them women 18 to 49 -- the most sought-after daytime demographic.

Indeed, while there still might be skeptics, the “Starting Over” franchise seems to know it’s onto something and is expanding its reach. On Sept. 19 the show began broadcasting a limited run of episodes focusing on couples getting the “Starting Over” treatment.

Mixing the archetypal with the exotic

THIS Thursday, Season 3 of the original version will begin as the audience meets the six new women moving into the house. Their issues are meant to be archetypal: For example, the show is bringing back a popular breast cancer survivor from the end of last season to continue to tell that story. But a few of the new cast are exotic enough to be attention-grabbers for new viewers sampling the show -- one woman’s mother died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, another is a disgraced radio personality.

Over coffee with the other life coaches at a midtown Manhattan hotel in the spring, Vanzant, who is an ornate speaker, talked about the show’s upcoming season. Flashy problems, she said, are the same as every other kind. “There are 10 stories in the naked city,” she said. “They all stand in that house as a representation of hundreds of thousands of unheard women, unseen women, alone women, who suffer.” Months later, at the leafy, sprawling “Starting Over” house in Encino, Vanzant was more specific: “We have cancer, infidelity, unemployment, bankruptcy -- but the experience of your life falling apart doesn’t need a name. It’s ‘My life is falling apart.’ ”

Britten explained the show’s tool-giving approach: “People have said to me, ‘I write down everything you and Iyanla say every day. I take the best tip and I practice it every day.’ ”

The coaches are very different. Vanzant is a shrewd, dreadlocked lawyer-turned-motivational speaker originally from New York City, whose sharp humor can be mocking. Britten -- a blond, Midwestern former actress -- is huggier but wired. They both create manageable steps for the women to reach their goals and give them assignments: Climb over this actual wall so you can get over your metaphorical ones; stand on a corner and tell your sad story to strangers until you never want to tell it again; get in that elevator and have a panic attack because what’s the worst that will happen?

Andy Paige, a cast member from the first group in Season 1, whose objective was to learn to trust other women and find a new career, said the daily homework was what helped her the most: “Anything is easy when you know how to do it -- and the exercises show you how.” (She now works almost exclusively with women, having started a beauty consulting company, and still appears on “Starting Over” to do makeovers.)

Kim Bookout arrived at the house in its second season with a burnt-out career as a dental hygienist, a string of broken relationships, and a penchant for spoiled behavior. She left having made up with her estranged sister and with a desire to become a coach herself. On the telephone from her home in Denver, she said: “I really did transform my life -- I’m a completely different person. I realize that it’s a TV show. But what I went through was real.”

Katz, who has therapy sessions with the women and consults with Britten, Vanzant and the producers, described why he thinks the “Starting Over” process works. “It’s an intensive group experience where you get a lot of coaching, from the coaches and from each other,” he said. “It produces an environment not only that’s ripe for change, but because other people are going through it with you, you have camaraderie and support.”

Bunim and Murray got the idea for the show in 2000, when threat of a writers’ strike loomed over network TV. At his office recently, Murray said, “We got word that CBS was saying, ‘Come up with a “Real World” for adults.’ ” The concept proved tricky to formulate. “The idea of young people living together at 22, it feels OK,” he said. “But people living together in their 40s, it’s like: Is that pathetic? So there has to be a reason why these people live together.”

They thought of a reason. “What if we created a house where people would come to readdress their life?” he said. They added coaching, an emerging trend in self-help, to that framework because “there’s a lot of us who get stuck and need someone to give us a kick in the pants, or give us the tools and resources to change,” he said. And finally, Murray and Bunim modeled the idea of an all-female house on her group of close women friends. “I’d watched the power of those relationships,” Murray said.

Since there never was a strike, “Starting Over” remained in purgatory until October 2002, when NBC Enterprises (now part of NBC Universal) bought it for the next fall season. Originally they set it in Chicago; it moved to Los Angeles for Season 2. By the time the show made its debut, Bunim was in the final stages of her illness. Before she died, Bunim and Murray brought in her friend Millee Taggart-Ratcliffe a soap opera actress turned head writer of shows like “The Guiding Light,” as a consultant.

Accentuating the positive

AT a recent interview in her office in a cozy guest cottage at the house, Taggart-Ratcliffe -- now an executive producer who runs the show -- said she became “obsessed” with “Starting Over” immediately. In shaping the daily episodes, she wanted to get away from highlighting the “negative qualities women have, the backbiting and the gossip.” She continued, “A lot of the editors were from ‘Real World,’ and that’s what they were seeing. But I saw something else. I saw the power of these women who come into the house in crisis.”

Britten was initially terrified of Taggart-Ratcliffe. “But Millee is incredibly funny, she’s incredibly insightful and she knows story better than anyone,” she said. “And if it came down to it, Millee would always choose the women. And that gives me great comfort.”

The show has had bumps. Not everyone graduates from “Starting Over” with honors -- in fact, several women have been booted. In one fascinating instance, housemate Sommer White, who was learning to live healthfully after a gastric bypass operation, became fixated on the show’s production. She continually talked about the show, which is against the rules because it not only makes the cast self-conscious, it creates unusable footage. On the episode in which Britten, Vanzant and Katz deliberated on her fate, they showed clips of her attempts to interact with the crew. Britten, who was her primary coach, said, “I didn’t realize it was that insidious. And when I saw it, I was the one that said, ‘Absolutely, she’s got to go.’ ”

The coaching staff has also suffered upheaval. Taggart-Ratcliffe brought Katz in for Season 2 because before then, if the show confronted “a psychological problem the life coaches were not equipped to handle, or licensed to handle, we had to push it back down,” she said. “I thought that was unfair to the women, detrimental to the women.”

And Rana Walker, who shared coaching duties with Britten in the first season, lasted only that year. She was less experienced than Britten, and it showed, in sometimes alarming ways -- she once broke down in tears while trying to prevent a cast member from quitting. When asked about Walker’s departure from the show and Vanzant’s arrival, Murray said they wanted Vanzant from the beginning -- she is a bestselling author from Oprah Winfrey’s hit factory and has a large following. But she was unavailable because she was taking care of her daughter, who was suffering from colon cancer and died in December 2003. “We decided that when Iyanla was a possibility for Season 2, we were just such huge fans of hers that we wanted to make a change,” Murray said.

For this third season, Vanzant nearly left. Murray said, “We went back and forth and had very direct and very honest conversations about what we needed from her and what she needed,” he said. “And there were times when she didn’t feel she could give that. But ultimately, we were able to work out with her a way for her to be involved, because all of us wanted her there.”

Vanzant can play verbal games to the point of hilarity. Question: What types of problems is “Starting Over” best at solving? Answer: “Human problems.” Question: What in your life has helped you as a coach? Answer: “I was born.” And so on. But on the subject of her contract deliberations, she spoke extensively, saying she had wanted to leave the show to go to seminary. Also, the 53-year-old said, “I’m old. I don’t want to work this hard.”

But Vanzant said she thinks they’ve created “a very powerful, although delicate, chemistry between the way Dr. Katz, Miss Britten and I work. I’m committed to this process. I’m committed to ‘Starting Over.’ ”

Season 1’s Paige described a similar feeling. When you’re in the house, she said, “You know in your head that there are a hundred people working very, very hard to help you change your life -- that is probably the most comfortable cradle of love that I’ve ever been in.” She began to cry. “I walk every day in the light of ‘Starting Over,’ because I really want to validate all their hard work.” She stopped crying. “So knowing that there are so many people trying to help you, it’s really encouraging to want to try.”