Téa Leoni vs. Traylor Howard
Battle of the Pretty, Perky, Button-Nosed Sassy Gals

We're not going to say that Téa Leoni has it hard. She's married to David Duchovny, she's got a lovely Hollywood family, and she turns up just often enough in high-profile enough roles to suggest that she works just as much as she likes, thank you very much. But these sporadic appearances have another effect. They remind us that we always wonder why we don't see more of Téa Leoni.

In fact, way back in 1999, we fame-audited Ms. Leoni and asked essentially the same question: why isn't she more famous? She's pretty. She's funny. She is, by all appearances, spunky. She's like the new Lucille Ball! In fact, we believe that, in the run-up to her failed sitcom The Naked Truth, she was marketed as "the new Lucille Ball."

In 1999, we also pointed out that Jenna Elfman -- also pretty(ish); also funny(ish); also spunky(ish) -- was breathing down Ms. Leoni's neck. Well, that's certainly not the case anymore. We suspect that the only place Ms. Elfman is breathing, career-wise, is on a mirror, held under her nose by a medical examiner.

This is not to say that Ms. Leoni's neck is now breath-free. It is not. It is a veritably breath-swaddled neck. And what she's feeling are the hot, ambitious huffs of her doppelganger and sudden niche-slot adversary, Traylor Howard.

Howard is pretty/funny/spunky. She's got her own Leoni-esque background peppered with sitcoms that never (Bram & Alice) or only sort of (Two Guys and a Girl) took off. She too has lingered in a Leoni-esque fashion, never quite breaking through, never quite disappearing altogether.

And now Traylor's making a concerted and dramatic push for prominence. She's in Son of the Mask -- which, admittedly, hardly looks like a sure-fire career booster rocket. (Replacing Jim Carrey with dog = spurious logic. Replacing Jim Carrey with dog + baby = spurioser logic.) But she's also surfaced as the new foil to Tony Shalhoub on Monk. In other words, she's reaching a critical mass of high-profile and/or prestigious roles that should position her perfectly to snatch Leoni's prettyfunnyspunky crown and claim it as her own.

Which may suit Leoni just fine. She only wears it about a quarter of the time anyway.

Advantage: Howard.