The Prime Time of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason : With Her Husband, Harry, The Unflappable Producer Has Become CBS’ Comedy Franchise

UM, DARA? DARA, MAYBE IT’S TIME that you show how you talk to me. . . .” Making the request in her light Missourian drawl is Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, creator, chief writer and executive producer of TV’s top-rated “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade.”

“ We love you, Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason, “ Dara Monahan, her assistant, recites in an impassioned drone, “ and we thank you every day for the jobs which we do not deserve. . .. “ Then Monahan dips her head as if in deep prayer.

She’s not carrying on like this because Bloodworth-Thomason is one of the few female powerhouses in the television industry. Or because Bloodworth-Thomason’s national recognition quotient was recently boosted by producing “The Man From Hope,” a 14-minute tear-jerking documentary about presidential hopeful Bill Clinton that climaxed the Democratic National Convention. Or because the bleachered studio audiences at “Designing Women” whisper Bloodworth-Thomason’s name among themselves, as delighted to catch a glimpse of her as they are to see Dixie Carter prissily hit her mark. No, she is carrying on like this because, like all running jokes, this slave-master routine seems funnier with each repetition. It also pays reverse homage to the fact that Bloodworth-Thomason is the kind of boss who really “wants things to be nice, wants everyone to get along.” (“I just was mean to a reporter on the telephone,” she mentioned one day, looking ashamed. “That means she didn’t offer her a job,” translates Dara.)

The careful maintenance of this unruffled atmosphere extends right into her work habits. Bloodworth-Thomason is known in Hollywood as a prolific writer who was born without a panic button--no deadline, no demand seems to rock her ladylike calm. It is in her frilly office at Mozark Productions in Studio City--the company owned and run by Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband, Harry Thomason--that she can most often be found, merrily pulling all-nighters. In fact, she possesses the believe-it-or-not achievement of having written in ballpoint pen on yellow legal pads the first 35 episodes of “Designing Women,” some completed in as little as six hours.

It all bears witness to her relentless optimism and her Queen Bee bravado, that same wild streak that allowed her as a teen-ager to enjoy water-skiing between tree stumps while the other girls hung back, twittering on the shore. According to Nancy Garrett, one of her oldest friends, Bloodworth-Thomason was always good at showing grace under pressure: “If we got in trouble in school, the rest of us would get upset. But Linda thought it was funny right away.”

If there was one incident that tested Bloodworth-Thomason’s dedicated imperturbability, it was her much-publicized dispute with Delta Burke. Two years ago, the twice Emmy-nominated actress from “Designing Women” blabbed to the Orlando Sentinel that she didn’t consider the show “a good workplace, not a good environment.” What happened next played itself out in the tabloids like a pro-wrestling grudge match fought with tersely worded press releases and weepy televised interviews. Finally, Burke got pink-slipped and, as things often go in Hollywood, ended up producing and starring in her own prime-time series, ABC’s “Delta.”

Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband, on the other hand, closed a $50-million deal with CBS to produce five new series with minimum orders of 13 episodes for each show.

The first installment in this bountiful package is their newest program, a romantic comedy called “Hearts Afire,” starring John Ritter and Markie Post. Breaking tradition, Bloodworth-Thomason scribbled out this one on sheets of white graph paper, telling the story of John Hartman (Ritter), an aide on Capitol Hill who pairs up with a temporarily luckless journalist, Georgie Anne Lahti (Post). Unemployed and broke, Lahti has to plead for the job of press secretary to Hartman’s boss, a crusty right-wing senator (George Gaynes) with a dingy mistress and an attention span that’s been lost at sea.

On this drizzly Saturday afternoon in May, as Bloodworth-Thomason and Monahan are running through their performance piece, the hourlong “Hearts Afire” series opener is in post-production. Shot in two days (“the new mentality of cost consciousness,” says Harry Thomason), the episode is due for delivery in 76 hours.

By anyone’s standards, this is a suffocatingly tight deadline, which means that it’s one of those circumstances that Bloodworth-Thomason greets wearing an expression of ecclesiastical serenity on her wholesomely pretty face. (While on the subject of what she is wearing, one might also address the issue of her rain gear. She’s got on oversized prescription sunglasses, suede shoes and a billowy silk pantsuit the color of dried lawn clippings.) She carries that air of breeziness right into the editing room, so that it’s hard to discern when the cogs start spinning in her head. Lit in the eerie, pale glow of several television monitors, she scrutinizes a mangled scene--one in which the actors’ lines don’t match up--and spiels out suggestions to the editor sitting beside her.

In the playback, it’s as if sanity has suddenly been restored to her show’s small-screen universe. To reward herself, Bloodworth-Thomason lets loose with a burst of tiny hand claps. Dara throws out: “ Oh, Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason, I hope that someday I will have your dedication to perfectionism. . . . “

Even in today’s ungainly form, it’s easy to see that “Hearts Afire’s” most psychologically dimensionalized character is that of Markie Post. It’s the know-it-all impatience of some veteran female journalists that Post gets just right. She marches imperiously through each scene, leaving in her wake a trail of bruised feelings and a cloud formation composed of cigarette fumes. But, as rumor has it, the dark-suited boys and girls upstairs are using buzzwords like “unsympathetic” and “too cold.” Perhaps it is with that in mind that Bloodworth-Thomason tries to subtly lighten things up by looping in a brisk off-camera apology from Post to Ritter. At the time, it seems like a nothing suggestion. But when the altered footage is shown, there is something genuinely believable about Post’s feeble stab at niceness. Bloodworth-Thomason happily flings herself back in her swivel chair. More little hand claps. Then. . . .there is silence.

Norma Vela, who will be sharing executive producer credit on “Designing Women” this year and who is sitting on the stained orange-wool couch behind Bloodworth-Thomason, gives a look of feigned exasperation. “Oh, OK,” Vela sighs. “Dara’s left the room, so I guess I’ll say it: Amazing, Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason, absolutely amazing. “

THREE MONTHS LATER AND SHE’S AT IT AGAIN, PUTTING IN 18-HOUR days producing “The Man From Hope” in addition to her other three shows. This time, of course, the stakes are much higher than when she is merely hammering out sitcoms, where a stink bomb episode one week can be erased by a better one the next. She gets a single pass at helping out her old friend Bill Clinton. And she keeps cranking up the tension by repeatedly reminding herself that this is her chance “to be part of history.”

In order to move the project into its final stages, Roger Clinton, who is Bill’s little brother and who also works for Mozark Productions as a $500-a-week production assistant, must sit still for an interview. But twice he has been a no-show. Now Roger, whose quotes will thread the short film together, has finally made an appearance. With the clock ticking away, Bloodworth-Thomason wants him to hustle. But first he wants to settle his wardrobe dilemma. “My eyes,” he wonders aloud. “Which one is better with my eyes? The blue?” he asks, holding a sapphire-colored shirt to his chest. “Or the green?” Up comes an almost identical shirt. “The blue? Or the green?”

It was 11 years ago that Harry and Linda (“I hate being called ‘The Thomasons.’ It sounds like the Flying Wallendas or something. I wish I never started this hyphenated thing. . . .”) were introduced to Bill Clinton by Thomason’s younger brother, Danny. From the very beginning, their friendship clicked. A small-town upbringing is something they all shared, as well as a precociously early fascination with politics.

In support of numerous liberal causes, the Thomasons dutifully shave away at their giant paychecks (including an annual $1-million donation to Linda’s Claudia Co., named after her mother, which puts Ozark women through college). But the intensity of the Thomasons’ volunteer effort in the Clinton campaign is considered a nearly unprecedented combination of politics and show business. For example, Bloodworth-Thomason comes up with catchy lines for the Clintons’ speeches. And this is how Harry describes his job as a key member of Clinton’s debate prep team: “It’s just to make sure Bill is shown in the most favorable light. And we don’t necessarily mean lighting.”

As the convention neared, however, it seemed surprising that no one blew taps on the video project before its completion. Possessing no actual documentary experience, Bloodworth-Thomason went out and collected 10 hours of film and amassed a hulking 1,000-page transcript. Much of the footage recorded ultimately disposable memories such as that of economics professor Robert Reich, an old friend of Clinton, woodenly recounting the time the presidential candidate brought chicken soup and crackers to Reich’s sickbed.

By the time “The Man From Hope” arrived at Clinton’s 14th-floor presidential suite in New York, Bloodworth-Thomason had ditched all the blathering about the governor’s relentless do-gooding and followed a sleeker plot line. Jimmy Carter’s former speech writer, Christopher Matthews, would call the film “the best thing at the convention, much better than (Clinton’s) speech, which was actually not a speech, but a briefing.” When Clinton saw the moving distillation of his life, it brought him to tears.

But many home viewers never caught “The Man From Hope” because the Big Three networks skipped showing it. “I thought it was unfair and irresponsible, not in the best tradition of American journalism,” says Bloodworth-Thomason. “For six months, they said (Clinton’s) personal life was news, and then on the one night he had a chance to say ‘This is who I am,’ they said it wasn’t news. Since then, I’ve had all these phone calls from some very big executives at CBS who have been very worried about my three shows and the presidential campaign. ‘You have to be fair,’ they keep reminding me. And I asked them, ‘Like the way they were fair at the convention?’ And they said, ‘Now, Linda. . . .’ So I told them if I were not a better sport, I would be writing the opening episode for ‘Evening Shade.’ In it, high school coach Wood Newton (Burt Reynolds) would be inviting everyone over to watch ‘The Man From Hope.’ The first line of direction,” she says, “would be: ‘Camera pans in for a close-up of Wood’s TV set and stays there for 14 minutes. . .’ “

TO BE FEMALE AND TO BE IN THE TELEVISION INDUSTRY, IT IS NECESsary to have a secret weapon, and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s is her husband, Mozark’s other executive producer. Few women in her chosen profession have risen as high as she has, and none of them have gotten very far without a partner who functions as an aggressive path-clearer. What Harry Thomason--51, white-bearded, rustically handsome--has is the Southerner’s gift of communicating an aw-shucks folksiness when, in truth, his widespread reputation is as a fearless negotiator. “I call him ‘The Hammer,’ ” says Jeff Sagansky, president of CBS’ Entertainment Division, who has worked with the couple since 1990. “When there’s a fight or a disagreement, he just wades on in; he’s the enforcer.”

When referring to this division of labor, Bloodworth-Thomason says: “It is not a gender-driven thing. I think that anybody, male or female, can do it. It’s just very, very hard to do alone.” Not that Bloodworth-Thomason can’t do the dirty work herself. (“She can do it,” Harry Thomason assures me.) It’s just not a lot of fun. (“She’s soft-hearted,” Thomason adds protectively. “It’s easier for me to clear the path.”)

The couple have been married for nine years, but have been together for 12. But after all this time, Bloodworth-Thomason’s voice still takes on a lowered, flirty quality when she takes her husband’s calls. She can make reminding her hypoglycemic mate to eat sound like romantic code. “ Hon-eee ?” she’ll purr into the receiver. “Why don’t you get yourself some cheese ?”

Thomason is from Hampton, Ark., a flyspeck hamlet where children were raised by parents who believed that “their kid could do whatever they wanted to do.” What Thomason himself wanted to do was, first, coach football (which he did, in Little Rock), then be an auteur . With no film schools in sight, he settled for cinema books checked out of the Arkansas capital’s library, and then he sweet-talked financiers into backing projects with names like “Encounters With the Unknown.”By optioning the rights to a Reader’s Digest story that became a movie of the week, he squeezed his way into Hollywood.

By the time Linda met Harry in 1980, he was hanging around the Columbia lot. Technically speaking, Bloodworth-Thomason made the first move: Hearing Harry’s slow-drive Arkansan accent, she waltzed into the office he was in and introduced herself. Things turned serious somewhere around the time her husband-to-be started calling her from pay phones insisting “that he wasn’t going to fall in love” with her. “That’s when I knew I had him,” Bloodworth-Thomason laughs. “I thought, ‘Boy, this guy has got it bad.’ ”

At 45, there still exists in Bloodworth-Thomason much of the adolescent girl. She is unparalleled in her ability to talk on the telephone, joking that it requires most of her take-home pay to underwrite her staggering phone bills. Upon request, she can perform her old high school cheerleader moves, leaping high into the air, touching her outstretched toes and landing on the carpet in the splits. In conversation, she is just as likely to interject a topical opinion as she is to bring up her knack for guessing the precise force of an earthquake. “I’m a human Richter scale,” she brags. “And if this doesn’t work out, I can join the carnival.”

In her vivid recollections of her childhood in Poplar Bluff, Mo., she seems to take as much pride in having been crowned Miss Popularity as she does in having ended up one summer on the police rolls. “We didn’t drink, smoke, have sex, nothing,” she says hastily. But . . . my parents did have this green Cadillac with fins on it. And I was the first to get my license. So the car was continuously filled with inappropriate amounts of people--maybe six inside and maybe six more riding on the fins. I’ve always been so grateful that I never killed anyone.”

Her aunt, Lou Felts, remembers her having “a very definite personality,” perhaps meaning that Bloodworth-Thomason was raised to be both a traditional Southern woman and much more than that. Early on, she began to function as mediator between her hard-drinking father and her mother, who wasn’t “good at arguing. So consequently when I was very young, I became her attorney. When (my father) came home, he would deal with me.” As a once “prissy tomboy,” she has come to believe that the contradictions in her psyche should be credited to her parents, who were truly loving but functioned as wildly opposing information sources. If it was from her mother, Claudia, that she inherited her reflexive graciousness, she firmly believes that without her father, Ralph, a brilliant, liberal litigator, that she’d “just be helpless--probably be married to some guy, sitting on a pillow and eating bonbons. My dad would teach me things like, ‘No one is better than anyone else,’ then my mother would overhear us and say, ‘Well, I’m certainly better than a lot of people I know,’ and my dad would just throw up his arms.”

At times she credits Markie Post as her best friend. At other moments, she will bestow this term of ultimate endearment upon Dixie Carter or Hillary Clinton or Harry’s brother Danny or seven women she went to high school with. But just when this qualifier becomes seriously meaningless, she says, sincerely, “Your best friends are important; they’re the only ones who hold you up when your parents go.”

Here’s a story about her that Post wants you to know: Once, after visiting Post’s house and finding it full of flower arrangements she’d let die, Bloodworth-Thomason assuaged her friend’s embarrassment by having a huge spray of dead blossoms delivered with a card that read: “Thought you might be able to use these for your collection.”

“There’s all this stuff that has happened to her,” ventures Post, “all this stuff that could be her life story. But instead she is so full of joy. And that side of her is never written about. To me, it’s a big part of why I love her.”

The spirit-draining “stuff” that Post darkly alludes to are the several seasons of devastation that Bloodworth-Thomason rarely discusses: In rapid succession, cancer took her father, mother-in-law, several of her uncles and her only brother’s wife, who left behind three young children whom Bloodworth-Thomason stepped in to help raise. (“When people say, ‘You don’t have kids,’ I always bristle, because I do .”) At about the same time, her mother contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. In 1986, she died. Bloodworth-Thomason characterizes this period as “being in the middle of a hurricane,” but she is just as likely to say: “I never wondered ‘Why me?’ because everybody is going to get it between the eyes sooner or later; that’s just a part of life.” What her Aunt Lou remembers is Bloodworth-Thomason’s desperately busy attempts to save her dwindling clan. “She just could not let go.”

Still, Bloodworth-Thomason summarizes her past by including herself among those to whom “incredibly wonderful things have happened that have been totally unexpected. I’m one of those people who picks up the telephone and says: ‘What? I’ve won a million dollars!’ ” This, she feels, is an indisputable fact, and she uses her passage from Poplar Bluff and into television as a prime example.

She had every intention of becoming a lawyer after she graduated from the University of Missouri with an English degree, but instead she meandered off to Los Angeles. “Some friends from college said they were coming out here, and I said, ‘Gee, I’ll come too.’ This is how the foibles of youth can hoist you on to fame and fortune if you’re lucky.”

She worked as a schoolteacher at Jordan High School in Watts, which involved 87 kids, 34 chairs and a hastily acquired drill sergeant’s delivery. “The first words out of my mouth were SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP! And I thought, ‘Whose voice was that?’ ” But she also serendipitously met Mary Kay Place, an actress with “great outfits and a Rolodex the size of a Ferris wheel.” They were incomparable banterers, and they began collaborating on scripts. They were practically a novelty act, given that female writing duos were virtually unheard of back then. They ended up at “MASH” in 1974, precisely when the hit show’s decision makers were searching for new voices.

Their first episode, “Hot Lips and Empty Arms,” won Bloodworth-Thomason and Place an Emmy nomination and a Woman of the Year award presented in a live televised broadcast from Lincoln Center. (“Mary Kay and I were going, ‘Yes! Yes! This is the way life will be from now on!’ Which is quite comical when you look back. I had no idea just how far from the seat of power I was.”)

Not long after, Place went off to act and Bloodworth-Thomason moved from free-lance scriptwriter to independent producer. “When I found out that more people saw ‘Hot Lips and Empty Arms’ than ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” she says, “that was it for me.”

Many years and a couple of fizzled series’ later, she sketchily conceived a sitcom about four women. The only hurdle was that Bloodworth-Thomason had no female role models for the opinionated back-talkers that existed in her imagination. So she based the characters instead on her daddy’s tippling buddies, big-mouthed intellectuals who knew something about everything and who didn’t mind sharing it. She also cribbed the basic action--characters sitting around yammering it up--from the dramatic ruckus of her childhood: “The advantage we Southerners have is free theater every night at home. Nobody takes turns talking--the person who gets to talk is the one who is standing on the ottoman. It was not Christmas in my family until my dad had made Aunt Lou cry for voting for Richard Nixon. That’s the kind of drama I’m talking about.”

Then Bloodworth-Thomason decided to turn her big-mouths into four regular working gals, and their fresh-from-the-slammer all-purpose male flunky, at a decorating firm in Atlanta. The set looked like something from the home furnishings section of a department store. But contained amid all the stained glass and white gladioli, this girly-girl foursome was somehow freed up to be cheekily feminist, or at least opinionated. It was Bloodworth-Thomason’s cleverest device, this understanding that full-chintz femininity would demilitarize things for those who might not agree with her on the issues.

After some initial bumpiness following its 1986 debut, (at one point, it was saved by a write-in campaign organized by The Hammer), “Designing Women” surged forward in the ratings, blasting its opposition right out of its sight lines and finally proving that, as “Entertainment Weekly” critic Ken Tucker says, “in the middle of a warm, huggy show you can deliver very strong ideas to a broad audience without alienating them.”

It also paved the way, in 1990, for “Evening Shade,” Bloodworth-Thomason’s paean to small-town Southern living, starring Burt Reynolds and such a pricey cast that each segment costs a reported $900,000. Like “Designing Women,” “Shade” eventually blew near the top of the ratings.

Mozark’s creations are such big hits, in fact, that Jeff Sagansky pays Bloodworth-Thomason the highest of television compliments: “Between her and Diane (English, of ‘Murphy Brown’),” he says, “that’s really the CBS franchise.”

THREE “DESIGNING WOMen” actresses are flubbing their lines. Annie Potts’ dialogue keeps evaporating in mid-sentence. Jan Hooks transposes one word for another. Dixie Carter loses her rhythm halfway through a complicated bit. Bloodworth-Thomason just sits cross-legged on the floor, yellow legal note pad in her lap, eyeing them evenly. Then the latest addition to the cast, stage actress Judith Ivey, dressed in gold-lame pumps and an all-white Dale Evans tailored pantsuit, hits the set, and things click back into place.

The ensemble of actors has always been important to the success of “Designing Women.” In fact, it is a particular quirk of a Bloodworth-Thomason production that the characters and the conceit of a show are not fully jelled until after the actors are cast; indeed, the pilot won’t even be written until casting is complete. For “Designing Women,” Bloodworth-Thomason scooped up Delta Burke and Dixie Carter from her misfire, “Filthy Rich.” The other two originals, Jean Smart and Annie Potts, had been in another Mozark goner called “Lime Street.” The quartet had an essence of locked togetherness, of four parts functioning as a single unit.

Which is perhaps why one troublemaking element could throw the show’s delicate machinery into an emotional tailspin. The escalating rounds between Delta Burke and Bloodworth-Thomason are well-enough known. In the media, at least, the skirmish never seemed to rise above a throwback vision of two women in a cat fight. The coverage evoked mainly the petty sub-themes of weight gain, charges of erratic behavior and the alleged spell that Burke’s he-man husband, Gerald McRaney, had cast over his impressionable bride.

Burke’s latest spin on the debacle has been to admit to reporters that the ugly publicity put her where she is today (“I wouldn’t be producing if it wasn’t for bad press. Well, it’s true !”) But when it comes to offering up explanations for her past behavior, an ABC representative will sigh wearily and say: “Delta’s done responding, if you know what I mean.”

And, it seems, Bloodworth-Thomason, too, is almost done responding. She knows there’s nothing more to say. But her nose-to-the-grindstone ethic is all about fixing things, about believing that as long as she tries hard enough, she can make matters right.

“What I didn’t know,” she begins, “was that if someone famous says you did something, then you can stand on the corner for the rest of your life and say, ‘Excuse me, not only did I not do that, I did the exact opposite of that,’ and people will split the difference. There is only one good thing that ever came out of this: I finally had to let go of the notion that it is necessary for everyone to like me.”

Then she offers a compelling rebuttal. “I never said an unkind word to this woman. Never have I said a negative word about her weight, nor would I. I’ve never even said something as harsh as ‘Gee, do you think you could try a little harder to be on time?’ It’s just not remotely the way I behave. I know that as a woman who has power that if I even ask for a larger filing cabinet, that could be interpreted as over-the-top. A woman has to be very careful about how she assimilates in this business.”

And that should have been that. But if any proof was needed that a single agitating component could tip things out of balance, it comes several days later. A noticeably unhappy Bloodworth-Thomason is on the telephone, saying: “(The Burke experience) felt like being in a car wreck and it feels like another one is coming. . . . “ Dixie Carter, it seems, has reported in on her background interview for this story. The interview had deteriorated swiftly. (When asked to confirm aspects of the Burke soap opera, Carter replied, with all the revved-up frostiness of her on-screen character: “My policy is that I do not talk about what was going on during those upsettin’ days.”) Now, based on Carter’s ripened version of the exchange, Bloodworth-Thomason is imagining that a hatchet job is in the works.

In a calmer mood, she can say: “On the big scope of important things in the world, this ranks about two billionth and one eighty-ninth. It’s a real trivial thing.” But at this moment, her voice sounds disconcertingly, uncharacteristically combative. And despite her frequent insistence that “it’s just impossible” for her to “confront other women,” she is doing just that.

Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband are proud of the genteel rules by which they run their business. They use words like decency and compassion . In separate interviews, both tell the story of rehiring an embezzling accountant. That is how important it is to them, their image of themselves as benevolent employers who don’t abuse their authority. In an industry populated by discontented egos and nakedly ambitious souls, it’s almost touching that what Bloodworth-Thomason seems most concerned about regarding the Delta Burke incident is that she could have been misconstrued as not nice .

But as she works over her side of the story again and again, even the amazing Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason seems to be coming to terms with the fact that sometimes you take no prisoners. “Listen,” she says. “The bottom line is that producers do not generally go around trying to destroy their own shows. Especially the ones who own 50%. I think it would be fair to assume that if we removed a major cast member a few months before syndication, then there must have been some pretty bad behavior going on.”

A few moments pass. “That’s not a very good quote,” she apologizes, sounding like herself again. “Is it?”

IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF “Hearts Afire,” there is a scene in which the senator, played by George Gaynes, performs a toneless, tape-accompanied rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” What home viewers will not see is what incited Gaynes’ a-rhythmic frug: Bloodworth-Thomason standing just off camera, wiggling crazily and frequently jamming her pointed finger toward the ceiling. It’s attention to the little touches such as these that counts, although at the time there was no telling if the studio audience grasped that Bloodworth-Thomason’s hip-shaking was not merely an act of free-spirited abandon.

While fine-tuning “Hearts Afire,” Bloodworth-Thomason is also reshaping “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade.” Since Burke’s huffy departure, the mass perception of “Designing Women” is that it’s aimlessly adrift, but, in fact, last season’s ratings were its highest ever. What this means is that Bloodworth-Thomason could leave well enough alone. But prior to the fall season, Julia Duffy was discreetly removed, and Judith Ivey was brought on, and Bloodworth-Thomason says she has plans for wising up Jan Hooks’ beguilingly spacey Carlene--”I’m going to raise her IQ by 30 points.”

“I personally feel the show is not where I want it to be,” is how Bloodworth-Thomason puts it, and she says she wants to make “Shade” “more like ‘Northern Exposure.’ ”

Not long ago the Emmy Awards came and went, and, as has become the tradition, Bloodworth-Thomason’s efforts were all but ignored. Over the years, “Evening Shade” has received seven nominations, none with her name attached (“Shade” has had two winners--actors Burt Reynolds and Michael Jeter). And while “Designing Women” has received 18 nominations, including three for Bloodworth-Thomason as co-producer of an Outstanding Comedy Series, only one of the more than 70 shows she has written has rated this industry accolade. And the only golden statuette the show has ever taken home is for Outstanding Achievement in Hairstyling.

“Let’s face it,” says Bloodworth-Thomason philosophically, “the academy is made up of men. And I think ‘Designing Women’ is too much (for them). Too Southern. Too loud. Too opinionated. I think the only way we’re not too much is with our hair.” Then she reveals her private fantasy: the curtain drops on the very last “Designing Women” episode and the cast and crew march out together, their Emmy for hairdressing held proudly over their heads.

It’s 8 o’clock now, the “Designing Women” taping is running distressingly late, but this latest group of actors seems to be fitting together well. But just in case, Bloodworth-Thomason will stay until the very last line is uttered from her cast’s lip-glossed mouths. She will not get much sleep tonight. The “Hearts Afire” cast members need scripts 12 hours from now, and she’s just gotten started on writing the show.

“This is just the closest I’ve ever pushed it to the edge,” she swears, as if anyone would believe that she won’t pull it off. “ Really. “