Brenda Strong was in line at a grocery store recently when a woman heard her talking and realized who she was - the melodramatic and mellifluous voice of the dead Mary Alice on Desperate Housewives.
The woman asked Strong to call her daughter in college, a big fan of the show. Strong intoned in her unmistakable cadence: "It's Mary Alice Young, and I'm standing here - next to your mother - in line at Trader Joe's and she is sooo proud of you. Always remember: Put your studies first. Because you never know what can happen."
Strong's voice is singular, but she's part of a growing chorus of actors doing voice-overs on TV shows. More than half a dozen shows - including Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs, My Name Is Earl and How I Met Your Mother - now use voice-over as a technique in advancing a story, teasing out a theme or adding humor or commentary to a scene.
Producers point to two reasons for the voice-over boom: They have less time to tell a story (a half-hour show now has up to nine minutes of ads), even as viewers have come to expect multiple, revolving storylines within a single episode. A narrator, they say, can help viewers make sense of it all.
The voice-over is especially useful in pilots, when a lot of back story must be conveyed - such as where characters work and what their relationship is to each other.
"In old pilots, you'll see lots of lines of people saying, `Dan, why would you say that to me? I'm your brother!' " said Bill Lawrence, executive producer of Scrubs, an NBC comedy that has used voice-over since its premiere in 2001.
"Before, you had somewhere from 24 to 25 minutes to do a pilot so you could waste five minutes setting up all the relationships and telling everybody who everyone is," Lawrence said. "Now you get 20 minutes, and by the time you've established the world and the relationships and who the characters are, there's not enough time to even do a show."
Not all shows with voice-over succeed. The CBS comedy Love Monkey was pulled from the air last week after just a couple of episodes, while the Heather Graham vehicle on ABC, Emily's Reasons Why Not, never got beyond its pilot episode. And Fox's Arrested Development, with comedy veteran Ron Howard as its voice-over narrator, ended its run last Friday after three seasons.
But Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy have become big hits for ABC, and producers of both shows say the voice-over is a signature element of what they do.
