'Parenthood's' feisty mama

Best fight on TV this month? The Pacquiao vs. Marquez PPV boxing match? The dos Santos-Velasquez UFC title match on Fox?

For our money it was this week's Braverman vs. Braverman throwdown on NBC's Parenthood.

In this domestic demolition derby, Kristina (Monica Potter) decimated her husband Adam (Peter Krause) when she found out he hadn't been entirely honest about that gorgeous young receptionist he hired.

Adam got off relatively easy. The week before, Kristina gave a boy she thought was picking on her son Max a verbal lashing so severe, you could practically feel the kid's growth spurt reversing itself.

Why so intense?

"The writers have alluded to the fact that Kristina didn't have a happy childhood," Potter says on the phone during a lunch break from shooting. "I think we're going to explore that. Maybe next season."

Kristina might also still be a little hormonal, having recently given birth to the couple's third child, Nora.

That mirrors Potter's experience as mother to Danny, 21, Liam, 16, and Molly, 6.

"It's ironic that they made my character pregnant on this show because I like Parenthood and want to stay with it," says Potter, 40. "In the past, when I really wanted to get off a show, I would just get pregnant."

She's kidding. We think.

"When I first moved out to Los Angeles, I was pregnant with Liam but I didn't know it yet," she says. "If I had, I probably would never have left Cleveland."

She quickly landed a role on the CBS soap The Young and the Restless.

"I got fired," she recalls. "Soaps are really hard. I was 23, playing a 16-year-old. I would get to the set every day and just start shaking I was so nervous.

"The producers called me in a month into it to let me go. Thank God, we were preempted by the O.J. Simpson trial so no one ever saw how horrible I was."

She claims it was her pregnancy with Molly that extricated her from Boston Legal. "All that legal jargon," she says, "whoa . . . ."

In between, she made films with everyone from Nicolas Cage (Con Air) to Robin Williams (Patch Adams) to Morgan Freeman (Along Came a Spider).

Parenthood, the second TV series to be based on the 1989 Steve Martin comedy, may provide the peripatetic Potter with a stable home.

Now in its second season, the show isn't scorching the Nielsen scoreboards on Tuesday nights (averaging 6.7 million viewers), but its smart writing and gifted cast give it singular appeal to a younger and more affluent female audience.

If nothing else, it has proven to be a fantastically accommodating work situation.

"At the beginning, I was really stressed," Potter says. "I had two big calendars, one in my trailer for work and one in my kitchen for family.

"There were so many conflicts I was going to have to bring on someone full time to help. Then I thought, 'No, I want to do as much of this myself as I can. If this show's going to be on the air for a while, I'm not going to miss out on all the stuff with my kids.' "

So now Molly's ballet lessons come ahead of Kristina's meltdowns.

Of course, you'd expect the producers of a series about that most overanalyzed generation, the echo boomers, raising their own children to be sensitive to parenting issues. They work Potter's shooting schedule around her real-life maternal demands.

But Potter's devotion to her home life has isolated her somewhat from her TV family.

"They do things together as a group all the time," she says. "Peter [Krause] and Dax [Shepard] and Joy [Bryant] and Lauren [Graham] and Mae [Whitman] hang out. I'm always invited. But there's always a parent-teacher conference or something."

Still, the glitzy showbiz life has turned out pretty much as Potter imagined it back when she was a tot growing up with three sisters in Ohio.

"I was a chubby 3-year-old and I would sing 'Rhinestone Cowboy,' " she says. "I remember my dad saying, 'You're going to be a movie star and live in California.'

"What I pictured when he said that was me wearing a sandwich board with a big star painted on it, standing on the street doing a tap dance and passing out money. Which, when you think of it, is kind of like what I do. Minus the sandwich board."