Ellen Pompeo vs. Julianne Nicholson
Battle of the Cutey-Pie Contenders to Become the Next Diane Lane

For everyone out there who preferred Janet to Chrissy, Bailey Quarters to Jennifer Marlowe, and the cute, no-nonsense brunette daughter (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) to the hot, airheaded blonde daughter (Lydia Cornell) on Too Close For Comfort, Hollywood obligingly provides a string of "quirky" yet appealing brunettes -- women who aren't straight-down-the-middle blonde fastballs, but rather are the sandy-haired off-speed curveballs of sex symbology.

We're not talking about Eva Longoria or Eva Mendes hot -- Hollywood's generic spicy firebrands. No, these are the sultry but safe brunettes, the patron saint of whom was, for a time, Anne Archer. These are the wives who look fetching in blue jeans. These are the tomboys who clean up nice. These are the women who play the best friend to the male lead who, after being rebuffed by a more glamorous blonde lust object, wakes up one day and realizes that his best gal pal was the perfect match for him all along. These are, in short, the spiritual children of Diane Lane, and the sisters of the eternally comely Maura Tierney.

Julianne Nicholson -- she of latter-day Ally McBeal (on which she was the anti-Portia de Rossi-style maneater, and the antidote to Lucy Liu's vaguely racist dragon lady) and, more recently, as Peter Saarsgard's wife in Kinsey -- seemed perfectly positioned to become the next cute/hot brunette, especially given her sprinkling of fetching, tomboyish freckles. Now, however, Nicholson's primacy is threatened. No, not by Cillian Murphy -- though in his new role as a transsexual in Breakfast On Pluto, he looks disarmingly like Nicholson. Rather, it's Ellen Pompeo, another not-immediately-sizzling-looking but ultimately quite sexy female.

As the inestimable Wing Chun once pointed out, Pompeo was, for a time, the apparent genetic replacement for Renée Zellweger -- herself the tomboyish, best friend, it-was-you-all-along love interest to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, before Zellweger decided to deny her roots (follically, as well as spiritually) and go glamazon blonde herself.

Recently, thought, Pompeo's become, if not a dead ringer for Nicholson, than a direct competitor. Nicholson starred on buzzy/sexy drama Ally McBeal, and Pompeo's now on buzzy/sexy Grey's Anatomy. On that show, she plays Dr. Meredith Grey, just as Nicholson played Dr. Jules Keating on the short-lived Presidio Med. Both have the kind of sleepy-sexy, nonthreatening but alluring kind of look that places them in contention to inherit Diane Lane's crown as the classy brunette queen of Hollywood.

(And, yes, it's true that neither is a true Van Valkenburgh brunette. Nicholson's sort-of, kind-of a redhead, while Pompeo's sort-of, kind-of dirty blonde. But in Hollywood's hierarchy, it's platinum vs. everything else.)

Which isn't to say that both can't thrive. But it's a lot better to be Hollywood's go-to best friend who's waiting in the wings than it is to be waiting in the wings to be Hollywood's go-to best friend waiting in the wings.

Advantage: Nicholson. Pompeo's got the hit show, but Nicholson's got the freckles.