On the brink of his return to network television, Michael J. Fox seems positively giddy.
“I’m like a horse in a paddock,” Fox told TV critics last month at a session hyping “Spin City,” his new fall sitcom for ABC. “I want to get going. . . . At 35, I realize this is what I really love. I love that it’s so risky. You start to go off on something and you have no idea where it’s going to go.”
In “Spin City,” Fox plays Michael Flaherty, the deputy mayor of New York, the guy who puts out the fires, spins the mayor’s messages and, as it happens, lives with an aggressive political reporter (played by Carla Gugino) who covers City Hall.
Fox, who played a key aide to the U.S. President in the romantic-comedy feature “The American President,” said that the political world offers actors the chance “to play very articulate, very bright, very energetic people with very loose morals.”
Even so, Fox said he was hesitant about returning to television in a role that seemed similar to the feature part. “It was one of my big concerns,” he said. “My first thought was, `I just did that and I don’t know if I want to do that again.’ “
The project moved ahead, he said, only after he was satisfied that his TV character actually would be a very different person from the guy he played in the movie.
“Spin City” is being produced at the Chelsea Piers studios in New York, in large measure because doing so allows Fox to “have a stable family life.” He, his wife (actress Tracy Pollan) and their three kids live in the New York area and in Massachusetts.
The city will play a large visual role in the show. “We plan on going out virtually every week and shooting in and around Foley Square and all around Manhattan,” Fox said. One or two episodes might be shot entirely on the city’s streets, he said.
The assignment of the character Fox plays in “Spin City” is, when it comes down to it, “to protect his guy and to get his guy re-elected,” Fox said. And to accomplish that goal, is there anything he won’t do? The answer is yes, but Fox wants to keep the lines a little fuzzy. “I like to play a guy who can be right on the edge of doing something despicable,” he said.
Speaking of which, Fox said he has given some thought to what might have happened to the fictional Alex Keaton as the fast-and-loose ’80s gave way to the ’90s. Fox, of course, shot to stardom playing the young conservative Keaton on “Family Ties” from 1982-89.
“I always figured that Alex was headed for a fall,” he said. “I think he probably went to work for a (savings-and-loan-scandal executive Charles) Keating-like character and was made the patsy.”
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