After premiering in 2007 as a one-shot mini-series, The Starter Wife was so successful and popular that it ended up garnering ten Emmy nominations in almost all major category, including a Best Actress nod for star Debra Messing for her role as a former wife turned single mom who is forced to re-start her life. While other full season shows with fashionable female leads tried to capture the hearts of women across the country, The Starter Wife was a digestible story many ex-wives and wives alike could identify with.

With The Starter Wife about to "start" its full season run on USA Network this coming October 10, we hit speed dial to take part in a conference call with executive producers/writers Josie McGibbon and Sara Parriott (Runaway Bride) to find out what fans can expect from Debra Messing's Molly Kagan character, what took place in the writers' workshops, and what it takes to win over female TV viewers.

THE DEADBOLT: How did the show end up being filmed in Australia?

JOSIE MCGIBBON: That was purely a financial decision and one that our industry might want to take a closer look at so we can keep productions in the United States. There were great, great tax incentives by going to Australia. Pure and simple, we could not afford to make it in the United States. That, however, needed to change when we went to series and we had to figure out a model, a financial model to make it feasible here because once it was going to be months and months of work every year, we weren’t all really packing up and moving to Australia. We had a great time. It was fabulous. It’s a wonderful place to work and Australians are wonderful people. It was really great.

SARA PARRIOTT: And we were also shooting from fall into winter and it was summer, so it was a glorious experience. We just had to get used to the sun rising over the Pacific instead of setting.

THE DEADBOLT: Are Molly’s experiences in the writers workshop based on anything that happened to you guys?

PARRIOTT: Only that people are critical of our work sometimes.

MCGIBBON: I would say it’s the sort of thing, the sort of conversations we have amongst ourselves and as Sara says, with getting notes, etc. I think also there is an element of all the wish fulfillment of all the crushes one of us had on English teachers our whole lives.

PARRIOTT: I also think that like being comedy writers, one of the scenes that we have with the writers group is where Molly is showing her children’s book and meanwhile all the serious writers have these deadly serious, heavy - As comedy writers, we always go, 'But we’re going for the jokes.'

THE DEADBOLT: I loved the fact that Joe Mantegna attended a funeral dressed as a woman to see what his friends would do. Are you going to fit anything like that in for the limited time that you have him back, like any kind of quirky stuff like that?

PARRIOTT: Yes, I would say, nothing quite as outlandish. He’s not wearing heels, and by the way, they gave him a bad back for a while. He hated his day in heels and they were low. But we do have a fun sort of splashy, beautiful piece in the last episode that I won’t tell you about that he’s involved in. His behavior continues to be idiosyncratic, but he’s never in a dress again. We’ll try, maybe next season again.

Other Conference Call Highlights:

Sara Parriottt and Josie McGibbon on what it takes for a TV show to win over and hold on to female viewers:

SARA PARRIOTT: For us, we feel like no matter what sort of milieu you set them in, the women have to identify with the stories that you’re telling. With our character, Molly, even though she’s in this very fun world to see if the very wealthy, Hollywood, wild story thing, her story about herself is basically one of a single mother who is struggling to find her own identity and raising a child with an ex and all these things that many, many women do. So we feel that no matter where it is, women really have to identify with who they’re watching.

JOSIE MCGIBBON: Also, women care about relationships with their friends, with their children, with their parents, with, of course, significant others or boyfriends or whatever. So I think that especially in shows that are dealing with a strong professional theme, if it’s a doctor show or on Cashmere Mafia, all the women were very successful, etc, and on our show, Molly is still trying to figure out how to succeed professionally, but we do so deeply care about the relationships more than getting the corner office at the end of the day.

Parriott and McGibbon on why Cashmere Mafia failed and how The Starter Wife is performing well:

PARRIOTT: I don’t know what all audiences like. Of course, we always will prefer our material over, we tried so hard to... we like to tell our story with humor as the emphasis and I don’t know whether that made ours more successful or not. It makes us personally something we prefer to see our foibles presented in a more humorous manner. We tried very carefully in ours to weave the stories of our characters together, so their lives interact a lot more and their stories run into each other. And in Cashmere Mafia, as many very successful shows do, they keep the characters’ stories very separate. And I don’t know whether that was the reason of failure or not, failure on either one of our parts, but goals that we have that we find successful are weaving the stories and really trying to tell our stories with humor.

MCGIBBON: Of course, ironically we lost Miranda Otto to Cashmere Mafia because when we made our show a miniseries we did not have options on all of our actors because we weren’t intending, and Debra didn’t want to be tied down to another series. When USA decided they wanted to continue with the series and Debra and Sara and I decided we did too, then we went screening around and Miranda was otherwise occupied. And we’ve talked to her since and saying if we get to come back next year we’d love to have her if she hasn’t found another show by then.

Sara Parriott on whether they created The Starter Wife with the idea of going to series:

"Not very much because Debra was, she had just come off of Will & Grace. She actually didn’t want to work for a while and take a break. But she got our script and really wanted to do it, but it was with a very firm saying and contractually, 'I’m not ready to go back into a series.' So that’s how we viewed it, but when it did so well and we got along so well and it was so fun, then all of a sudden the doors opened again."

Josie McGibbon on whether we'll see Pappy:

"We are, we’re going to see Pappy. He’s not played by an Australian. He’s played by Ronny Cox. Actually, since your blog has to do with women and girls I’d just like to say in case no one asks specifically, we have an incredibly high population of women on our crew and half of our directors are women, and we’re really proud of that. I think it’s a cool thing.

"In fact, people have come to our set and have been sort of surprised. Often you go to a set even on a show about women and the only women on the crew are make up and hair, and we’ve got women in every department and quite a few of them. Often the men look around and go, 'Huh, there aren’t as many of us.' And we say, 'No, there aren’t, but it’s more fun, isn’t it?'"

McGibbon on the transition from Molly's expensive Chanel and Prada fashion wear to her lower budget:

"We had long talked about this because first of all, she’s not dead broke. But secondly, we all reasoned no one stole her closet, so she gets to have all her things. What we wanted, though, to reflect Molly’s new sort of breaking out of just the mold, is that she mixes and matches more and that there can be then, the Chanel top with the pants from Barneys, or whatever, that we can have fun with accessories and styles like that and make her look very individual and fashion forward and, of course, we cheat because of course she’s wearing things that are new. But that we decided it isn’t as though she had to sell all her clothes and wear our clothes."