Jonathan Storm: Putting on her TV shoes

It was a marriage made not in heaven, but in Hollywood. Three women. No man.

The baby, State of Georgia, arrives Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. on ABC Family. It's a broad sitcom with a modicum of fun, written by big-time chick-lit author, and Philadelphian, Jennifer Weiner. She has sold 11 million books in 36 countries, but she has never made a TV show.

State of Georgia stars been-on-TV-since-she-was-a-baby Raven-Symone as Georgia and the well-traveled but still somewhat obscure Majandra Delfino, whom TV heads may best remember as the snarky Maria DeLuca, human girlfriend of an alien, on Roswell more than 10 years ago.

Delfino has never done a traditional sitcom before, and she's surprisingly good. "Sometimes you just look at her, and it's like visiting a museum," says Weiner, providing a clue as to how she got so rich and famous as an author, after leaving The Inquirer in 2001, following a six-year stint as a feature writer.

Weiner, pronounced WI-ner ("Anthony Weiner has ruined a perfectly good name for a lot of people," she says), is much greener than Delfino. Yet here she is, executive producer of her own show, surrounded by scads of cast, crew, and cowriters, with a TV veteran partner, Kirk Rudell, co-executive producer on Will & Grace, to keep things running smoothly.

It's very different from sitting all alone in a garret in Queen Village, where she has lived for years, making a book, and she's glad.

"I love being around people, having other people to talk to," she said in a phone interview from her L.A. office. "It's very lonely writing novels."

Weiner is a gregarious scribe. Many authors dread book-tour publicity. She says she likes it, and a new tour is in the offing. Then Came You, about a wealthy woman, her stepdaughter, an egg donor, and a surrogate mother, is 70th on the Amazon fiction list, and it won't be published for three weeks. She'll talk about the book in an appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., on July 13.

Weiner gave out whoopie pies on a mini-tour in May in New York and at the Gershman Y in Philadelphia to mark the paperback release of her seventh novel, Fly Away Home.

Why whoopie pies? "Because they're delicious!" she writes in an e-mail. "And I did cupcakes last year."

She's big on computer interaction. Time readers voted her the world's 14th best Twitterer.

"A lot of authors would rather be beaten than having to be on Twitter or talk and connect to readers," she says, "They find it invasive and uncomfortable, [but] I really enjoy using social media to keep in touch and to sort of have a back-and-forth with people."

TV gives her a bigger canvas on which to tell her stories. In 2008, ABC Studios threw a big bag of money at her (reportedly more than $1 million) in a "development deal." The requirements: Work two years, cook up four shows. State of Georgia was the first, and the only one that got produced.

Meanwhile, ABC had separate "holding deals" with Raven-Symone and Delfino. Put it all together, and that spells fun, maybe more for the makers than the viewers, at first blush.

The pilot features one big move from the Disney Channel Acting School, as described on Saturday Night Live this season by Miley Cyrus and Kenan Thompson (playing Raven): "On the Disney Channel, every person has to be the loudest person in the room."

Weiner, who has now produced nine episodes, promises that will change.

"As Raven gets more comfortable with the character," Weiner says, "it's less the girl you knew and loved from That's So Raven, and more of what Georgia was meant to be."

That's an aspiring actress with a lot of chutzpah who deals with setbacks in a positive way, not unlike her creator. Delfino plays her buddy, a physicist who can use some of Georgia's confidence.

There's no attempt here to remake Crime and Punishment, just to make something fun that people will like.

"It's really refreshing to be in Hollywood," says Weiner, "where people unabashedly treat being popular as a good thing.

"The literary culture has this weird relationship with popularity: 'If it's a best-seller, it's probably schlock and harming - capital L - literature.' That's hard to deal with if you're writing best-sellers and trying to make them good."

Does that mean Weiner, 41, and her husband, Adam Bonin, and their two daughters, Lucy, 8, and Phoebe, 3, are not long for Philadelphia?

"My friends at the network would be very happy if I just give it up and move here already," she says, "but I've lived in Philadelphia longer than any other place in my whole life. It's a special place."

Still, the LaLa lure is tangible, she says.

"It's a real joy to go live before a studio audience, and you get to put on a show every Tuesday for them and make them happy.

"This sounds super-cheesy, but there's something kind of magical about it."

Television

State of Georgia

8:30 p.m. Wednesday on ABC Family