(partial article on the second season of "Naked Truth")

Naturally, the ratings were good. Still, the network ordered another overhaul. Now, Leoni, Mark Roberts and Holland Taylor are the only returning cast members.

"The show has had a very checkered history, and not altogether pleasant," Taylor notes. "It has been a 'very bumpy night,' as Bette Davis would say." The original executive producer was Chris Thompson. It was he and Leoni who suggested Taylor be cast as the editor of the Naked Truth scandal sheet, the Comet.

In the first NBC season, Taylor was demoted to gossip columnist. Now she has been hired as editor of a rival tabloid and lures her buddy away from the Comet.

It's a departure that Taylor doesn't play a mother. Having "passed the half-century mark," she has been screen mother to Nicole Kidman in To Die For, Kevin Bacon in She's Having a Baby, Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day, Leslie Mann in George in the Jungle and, upcoming, Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. That's an achievement for someone who has no children and has never married.

"I always thought I would probably end up marrying in my 60s," Taylor says with a laugh. "Katharine Hepburn once said she would have been a terrible mother; there was no way she could be who she was as a professional woman. And she would not want to do anything that she couldn't do well. "That really does say what I feel. I've tried to take care of myself, which I'm doing rather well, now that I'm a matron, for heaven's sake. It did take me half a lifetime to figure out how to do it."

Holland (a family name) Taylor was born and raised in Philadelphia and educated at Bennington College in Vermont. An arts major, she headed for New York after graduation and soon became busy in films and theatre, making her Broadway debut with Anne Bancroft in The Devils. Like many actors, Taylor did soap opera duty early in her career, playing the infamous Denise Cavanaugh on The Edge of Night. "After the first season, I had about two months to go on my contract," she recalls. "They turned me into an arch-murderess. In two months, I killed about five people. I did that by throwing poison -- Tic-Tacs were the props -- in their coffee. "I was so evil that I died of natural causes and was murdered on the same day."