Christine Baranski's Jim Year

Christine Baranski plays a hard-driving executive of a morning news show in the new CBS series Welcome To New York, and stars in with Jim Carrey in How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

She spoke with CBS News Correspondent Mark McEwen on the Early Show.

For Welcome To New York, she did a little on-the-job training -- right here at the Early Show to get ready for her role.

What sort of training did you do on our show?

CHRISTINE BARANSKI: Well, the pilot got picked up and I thought, oh, my God, I'm really going to have to play an executive producer of a morning show. I thought, CBS is our network. I made an appointment to meet with Lyne Pitts, your exec.

She happened to be out of town, so I followed (senior executive producer) Steve Friedman all morning and I'm thinking to myself, this is the equivalent of learning about baseball by sitting in the Yankee dugout with (Yankees manager) Joe Torre. He is top of the line. It couldn't have been more gracious.

We were in there, the control room, at 6:00 in the morning and he'd be reading Variety and drinking his coffee and eating a donut and I'm thinking 'Aren't you kind of nervous?' Then the show started and it seemed like there were a thousand television monitors and all of these angles and segment producers waiting for their thing, people on headphones and people on the telephone.

Then you're watching your competition mainly on the upper wall and I thought, 'What a world, not only are you living in that second but ten seconds ahead and a half hour ahead and a half hour ahead of that.'

It's an amazing world, very admirable what you do.

McEWEN: I thank you very much and thanks to Steve. Marsha (her character on Welcome To New York) is sweet, dear, loving, kind -- none of those things -- I said this to you before, if you have hot coffee, and Marsha sticks her finger in it, it gets cold in a minute.

BARANSKI: The great thing about starting in a place where the woman is very controlled and very frightened of giving away any power -- wants her boundaries very clear -- is that in walks a guy from another part of the country who says, 'Hey, let's celebrate birthdays at the office,' or, 'Let's go out and eat and go to a show together and hang out,' and she's like, 'Nope, nope, nope.' And then you see her start to loosen up. That's a wonderful journey.

McEWEN: You've got a big movie coming out at Christmas time, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, with another Jim, not Jim Gaffigan but Jim Carrey.

BARANSKI: I know. This is my Jim year. But let me first say I adore Jim Gaffigan and what a great colleague he is and what a great staff we have. I have the extravagant fortune to work with a guy the caliber of Jim Carrey who is -- well, e's kind of a force of nature, I mean, his energy. And I think whether he likes it or not the Grinch will be his defining role of his career. He's utterly brilliant. It's a Ron Howard movie.

And I have to say this because she's on the show, I play the Martha Stewart of Whoville. She wins every Christmas contest, and her lights on her house are perfect, and her hostess gown -- when she's decorating in her living room -- matches the bulbs on her Christmas tree. Everything matches everything else. It's a wonderful Martha Stewart joke. Martha Stewart will love it because I'm rather glamorous in the movie.

McEWEN: Christine Baranski, you are a force of nature.