It's been more than a decade since "Playing House" stars and real-life best friends Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham first met at New York's Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.
But their improv background is on full display in the new USA Network comedy series (premiering Tuesday at 10 p.m.) where they play childhood best friends Emma and Maggie, who find themselves living together and raising a baby when one's marriage ends.
"The circumstances that we find ourselves in are definitely different from our personal lives," says Parham, who plays the rational and safe Maggie. But "the dynamic that you see between Jess [who plays the brash, assertive Emma] and I on screen is exactly how we behave in real life — that chemistry, the yin and yang."
To get their on-screen banter as authentic as possible, the duo improvise all the scenes in front of their writers (Parham plays all the male parts), who record and transcribe them to form the script. "We started as performers and not writers, so this was a way for us to get around the terror that we feel when we look at a blank screen," St. Clair tells The Post. "We found that we [otherwise] couldn't capture the way that we overlap each other and the weird way best friends talk."
And instead of casting for guest stars, they recruited their improv-comic friends from the UCB — like Comedy Central's Keegan-Michael Key, who plays Mark, Emma's ex-boyfriend and a local cop — as well as Zach Woods, Jason Mantzoukas, Andy Daly, Lindsay Sloane and Bobby Moynihan.
It's not the first time Parham and St. Clair have played best friends on screen. Their short-lived NBC comedy "Best Friends Forever" lasted only six episodes back in 2012, but it taught them how to executive-produce a TV show. For "Playing House," they wanted to tap into their lives as new moms — Parham was eight months pregnant when filming the pilot and St. Clair was secretly three months along.
Having infants while filming the series called for some creative time-management — including an on-set nursery and instituting a strict 6:30 p.m. wrap. By avoiding the typical grueling 15-hour days, they managed to have lives — fodder for a potential Season 2. "The truth is when you set these boundaries, you end up getting the work done and it doesn't suffer for it," St. Clair says. "Especially comedy — it doesn't get better after the 50th take you do."
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