NEAR "TIME"

Jennifer Love Hewitt's career just keeps getting hotter and hotter. The Hollywood trades report that the 19-year-old actress is this close to sealing a deal with Fox to star in a spin-off of Party of Five.

The still-untitled show, which is being developed by Po5 creators Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman and producer Columbia TriStar TV, will center on Hewitt's Party character, the wise beyond her years Sarah Reeves.

Hewitt, who joined the show in the second season, shot to fame as the ever-patient and ever-emoting on-again, off-again girlfriend of Bailey (Scott Wolf), one of the five depressed siblings (along with Charlie, Julia, Claudia, and little Owen) in the orphaned Salinger clan.

In Po5's fifth season-opener on Sept. 16, Sarah, who is adopted, is searching for her biological father. According to Daily Variety, Sarah will leave her hometown of San Francisco at the end of this season to continue to look for her birth parents.

"Basically, she's a young woman, an orphan, in search of herself," Keyser tells the Hollywood Reporter. "But we do not want to duplicate Party of Five, so it may be a little funnier and have a lighter tone."

That should be welcome news for the show's devoted fans, who have most recently suffered through Charlie's cancer and Bailey's alcoholism. There were jokes that the series should be renamed Party of Job because of the Salinger's constant sufferings.

But don't expect to Sarah to cut herself off completely from those loveably whiny orphans, who have standing reservations on Fox for the next two seasons. "We would like to have connections between the two shows from time to time," adds Keyser, "but we're so early in the process that it would be premature to have specific negotiations with anybody about that."

Daily Variety reports that Hewitt will receive $1.3 million whether the show makes it to the air or not. In addition, she'll receive a producer credit on the new series. Her salary is expected to exceed $100,000 per episode, sources tell the trade.

Why was Hewitt, and not Neve Campbell or Wolf, rewarded with her own show? According to Lippman, it came down to not wanting to break up the dour Salingers. "Here's a character without any real family, and we felt Hewitt could carry her own show," Lippman tells Variety. "She has tremendous charm, and she works with huge mouthfuls of dialogue."

Hewitt, who recently signed on to play Audrey Hepburn in an upcoming ABC biopic, has made her mark on the big screen in the teen comedy Can't Hardly Wait and the teen horror flick I Know What You Did Last Summer. Next up: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. She's also released three R & B CDs and is developing a Wedding Singer-like script titled Cupid's Love.

Hewitt's new series is expected to hit the air in the fall of 1999.