Ellen Gray: Lifetime's 'Diva' has an accidental singer

DROP DEAD DIVA. 9 p.m. Sunday, Lifetime.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - No one, it appears, set out to make Lifetime's "Drop Dead Diva" an occasional musical.

Not Brooke Elliott, a Broadway veteran who stars (and sometimes sings) as Jane Bingum, a staid lawyer possessed by the spirit of a ditzy blond named Deb (Brooke D'Orsay).

Not Josh Berman, who, before creating "Diva," wrote for CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and Fox's "Bones."

Not even, apparently, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, two of Berman's fellow executive producers and the Oscar-winning team behind the movie musicals "Chicago" and "Hairspray."

"Craig and Neil came onboard during the pilot stage, but at that point we had never discussed any musical elements," Berman said at a Sony Pictures Television cocktail party last week.

"We had Brooke sing in a couple of early episodes, and her voice was so amazing and the viewers' response was so incredible that we wanted more of her and we kept doing more and more and more," he said.

"More and more" has so far placed "Drop Dead Diva" somewhere on the TV musical spectrum between "Ally McBeal" and "Glee," and provided a recurring gig for former "American Idol" judge Paula Abdul, who'll be in "Diva's" court for the show's Season 2 finale on Aug. 29 (and has already filmed a scene for a prospective third season, according to Berman).

Elliott, who'd been part of the ensemble in "Wicked" and who stepped out of the ensemble and into her biggest theatrical role - Sue in "Taboo" - after the original actress cast left to have a baby, never set out to sing on television.

"I was doing Broadway and my show had closed. And a couple of years before . . . I was really feeling a pull for TV, so I started taking classes, just tons and tons of TV classes," she said in an interview last week.

"This audition came up and, you know, with auditions, they come and go, and you don't know if anything's going to hit or not. So I just went in wanting to do a really great audition, and then I went and got dinner," she said, giggling, "and then it just kind of snowballed."

Anyone who's read a Playbill knows that "a pull for TV" translates into a paycheck for many an actor on Broadway, where credits like NBC's "Law & Order," and now, CBS' "The Good Wife," are sprinkled through cast biographies.

But Elliott, it seems, actually watches television.

"I love TV," she said, laughing. "I'm a big TV girl . . . I watch '30 Rock,' 'The Office,' 'Modern Family,' 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'Damages,' my guilty pleasure is 'The Bachelorette' and 'The Bachelor' - it's very Deb of me, but, yeah, I get kind of sucked into those - but I didn't see the finale last [Monday] night, so nobody's allowed to tell me" what happened.

"It's funny, because as I start to watch ['The Bachelorette'] I'm like, 'I love this show!' and about halfway through the show, I'm going, 'Why am I watching this show?' " she said.

Deb, of course, wouldn't have to ask.

D'Orsay, who plays Deb in the body she no longer occupies, is still occasionally seen in flashbacks, but Elliott, who plays someone everyone calls Jane, still thinks of her role as Deb.

Elliott's character, she said, doesn't have Jane's memories, "just her brain."

Though both women died in the pilot, Deb, an aspiring model, was brought back to life, only to wake up in Jane's plus-sized body.

Confused yet?

"It's her soul, so I tend to call her Deb, Deb/Jane, because it is through Deb's eyes. And Jane influences Deb's behavior with her brain," Elliott said. "Things that Jane possessed" - including common sense - "are now influencing Deb's behavior.

"In Episode 11 [scheduled to air Aug. 22] of this season, you get to see more old Jane, which is really fun. And you'll get to see old Jane right next to new Jane, which is really, really fun," she said.

And if that's not confusing enough, there's Grayson (Jackson Hurst), a colleague of Jane's who was, and seemingly still is, in love with Deb, whom he believes to be dead.

If the series were to run for several more seasons, should Grayson and Deb/Jane end up together?

"That's what I would like," said Elliott. But "I don't want her to have to tell him [that she's really Deb in Jane's body]. I want him to fall in love with Jane."

ABC's documentary series "Boston Med" ends its summer run tonight (10 p.m., Channel 6) with an episode that, if you saw it on "Grey's Anatomy," you might not believe it.

Truth being stranger than fiction - and considerably harder to manipulate - it took many hours of filming and some serendipitous events outside the producers' control to put together a story in which two families are brought together by a face transplant, an operation that in itself stills feels in some ways like the stuff of fiction. *

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