The billboards are impossible to miss. There she is: Olive skin glistening, leg arched seductively, virtually naked save for flesh-coloured lingerie that barely contains her ample cleavage.
Jennifer Love Hewitt has towered over fast-food joints and gas stations for months to sell the actress' new show, The Client List. On the programme, she plays a Texas single mother who works at a full-service massage parlour to make ends meet.
The series marks a new creative direction for the relatively chaste Lifetime TV network, best known for its ripped-from-the-headlines, made-for-television movies and tacky reality shows. The move signifies no less of a change for the 33-year-old actress who rose to early fame playing a wholesome girl next door on the long-running '90s family drama Party of Five.
But after appearing in a few teen movies — most memorably 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer — her big-screen turns weren't as well-received. It wasn't until the 2005 launch of Ghost Whisperer that Hewitt regained her stride. The series, about a woman able to communicate with spirits, earned solid ratings and ran for five seasons.
"I think people were expecting me to go play another network show and play the same girl I've been playing for a long time," she said, sitting at a booth last month at Corky's diner in Sherman Oaks, where The Client List crew members were preparing for a scene in the show's sixth episode. "But now starting my 24th year in the business, I needed a little bit of a re-creation. I looked at my career and thought, ‘Let's shake it up a little bit. Let's have butterflies in our stomach.'"
The Client List grew out of a movie of the same name, also starring Hewitt, that ran on Lifetime in 2010. Lifetime executives, who've struggled with ratings in recent years, were encouraged by the film's strong numbers. "This is a bold series for us, there's no doubt about it — and we want to bring in new viewers," acknowledged Rob Sharenow, Lifetime's executive vice-president of programming. "We're proud of our Lifetime movies, but we are trying to evolve the mother ship and do things that are more accessible to the general public. And with this show's marketing campaign, I've definitely had a lot of anecdotal comments from men who have never noticed Lifetime in quite the same way."