(Photo: Gale M. Adler/CBS Paramount)

Sexy beast: Meet Bram Shepherd, an incorrigible womanizer played by Alfred Molina, and his long-lost daughter, Alice, played by Traylor Howard, the perky blonde from Two Guys and a Girl and Boston Common.

You read it here first: Writers Joe Keenan and Christopher Lloyd, the team behind Frasier, got the idea for Bram -- a New York novelist who's still dining out on a Pulitzer Prize won 30 years earlier -- from the party pages of this very magazine. "There are people whose pictures you always see," says Keenan, "enjoying the fruits of fame when the actual achievement that justified that fame was in 1986."

Bram vs. Frasier: "They both have a fair amount of erudition and vanity," says Keenan, "but Frasier is such an ethical character, while Bram's shamelessness is his most attractive quality."

Double time: This fall, Molina plays another lothario in Frida. "It's an odd coincidence," he says. "I thought, Well, it will be my last fling before my descent into severe middle age."

Bram and Alice
Sundays, 8 p.m., CBS.

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• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Sarah Bernard