CASTING COUCH The women of Exes and Ohs lean on each other in the good times and the bad.

Who says all lawyers are bad? Certainly not Michelle Paradise. The writer, actor and series creator for Logo’s new lesbian dramedy Exes & Ohs—which made its series premiere earlier this week on Logo and repeats on Friday 12 and Sunday 14—has a legal eagle to thank for sparking her interest in screenwriting.

“One of my best friends is an attorney and was representing a writer-director and asked if I wanted to read this person’s script,” says Paradise, a San Diego native who’d moved to San Francisco for grad school. “I read this feature-film script and I realized this is the kind of writing that I need to be doing and this is the format for telling my stories.”

After devouring screenplays, Paradise started writing them. One sparked the interest of filmmaker Lee Friedlander, who turned it into a 2002 short called “The Ten Rules.” It concerned a group of gay gal pals navigating the “rules of the lesbian dating scene” (like the old joke about bringing out the U-Haul on a second date). It was featured prominently that year in LGBT film festivals, but in those pre–L Word days, Paradise couldn’t imagine the 28-minute film would go any further.

“There were maybe just a smattering of shows that featured gay and lesbian characters front and center,” she says. “At the time, the notion that there could be a show about all lesbians was such a foreign concept.”

Then along came LGBT network Logo in 2005, and with it an interest in a scripted show that prominently featured lesbian characters. Logo seized the opportunity to expand “The Ten Rules” into an episodic format. Although the film focuses on lesbian-dating clichés, Paradise knew that a one-trick pony like that wouldn’t work on a weekly basis.

“The pitfall with a stereotype is that it’s so one dimensional,” she says. “You can’t play solely on a stereotype with a three-dimensional character.”

Paradise, who plays the charming but neurotic Jennifer in both the film and the TV version, decided the characters needed to be fleshed out. Exes & Ohs centers on Jen’s circle of Seattle-based friends who share relationship problems while leaning on each other for comfort. Those friends include femme fatale Sam (Marnie Alton), baby-dyke Crutch (out actor and Welcome to the Dollhouse star Heather Matarazzo), and longtime girlfriends Kris (Angela Featherstone) and Chris (Megan Cavanagh).

Aside from Paradise, Cavanagh is the only performer to appear in both “The Ten Rules” and Exes. The openly gay performer and Oak Park–River Forest native is most recognizable to audiences as the second baseman (in a role that was bigger than Madonna’s) in the film A League of Their Own. Cavanagh cut her teeth at venerable Chicago institutions like Victory Gardens and Second City before relocating to L.A., where she landed the role in the 1992 film.

For Cavanagh, the best part about playing Chris is the opportunity to portray a woman on TV who isn’t a size five. “A lot of gals I know will really relate to her,” she says. “She’s a big girl for television. All of the dykes that I know in the Midwest are big. She [also] has a big heart.”

And relatability is key. Exes plays like a cross between Sex and the City and Friends, shows that presented familiar archetypes with which audiences could immediately identify. Notable, too, is the  seemingly mundane presentation. Its sitcom format is so familiar that it flattens our impulse to label it “gay TV.” And that suits these ladies just fine.

“It’s just a bunch of people that live near each other that are good friends and hang out and eat, cry and laugh together,” Cavanagh says. “I can say with confidence that lesbians are gonna like this show.”

Exes and Ohs airs Mondays at 9pm and again later in the week. See logoonline.com for a complete schedule.