70 EMMY
In the early days of developing Carol’s Second Act, Heaton also checked
in with former costar Ray Romano to get his advice.
“She knew she was going to be the ‘me’ of this show,” he recalls,
explaining, “It uses what she’s going through personally, kind of like when I
did Men of a Certain Age and Raymond. This show is going to represent her,
and she wants to make sure she gets it right. She’s a strong-willed person,
and if something was not right in a script [on Raymond], we’d talk about it and
fix it. When we talked about her new show, she wanted to know what I did tomake sure the writing on Raymond was always there. I don’t think she even
needed to do that. I trust her instincts for character and writing and comedy.
She is good at knowing where the laugh is, and what is too joke-y.”CONFIDENCE IS NOTHING NEW for this Ohio
native. It goes all the way back to when she was five or six years old, the day
she ran into her Aunt Jane’s Cleveland kitchen to alert her mother that she