Melissa McCarthy, from Plainfield to primetime

Like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” Melissa McCarthy found that growing up on a farm just naturally put her on the yellow-brick road to stardom.

“I grew up on a farm right outside Plainfield, a corn and soybean farm,” said the star of CBS' Chicago-based sitcom “Mike & Molly,” “and being stranded with no neighbors made me form an imagination. When you're out on a farm, you've got to make up something.

“I didn't have any friends that lived around me,” she added. “I had friends at school, but they were all in a neighborhood together and could play after school, and I was out on the farm.”

Her mother still likes to recall McCarthy was always putting on her own shows as a child. “Too much free time maybe that's what made me a star,” McCarthy said over lunch recently at the Atwood Cafe in downtown Chicago.

The setting, one of Chicago's finer restaurants, wasn't lost on McCarthy, just as it wouldn't be lost on the characters she's most known for: Molly, the schoolteacher who met the love of her life, Billy Gardell's Chicago cop Mike, at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, and before that the endearing chef Sookie on “Gilmore Girls.”

Yet her road to stardom wasn't a straight line. McCarthy took part in only one school play while attending St. Francis Academy in Joliet, and went on to pursue textiles, fashion and design at Southern Illinois University. That was still the field she intended to enter when she went to New York City at 20, but then she abruptly decided to try standup comedy.

“I had never done anything like it,” McCarthy said. “But I'd always told stories and made friends laugh. It seemed to be the direction I was going in.”

Nine years later, she was still doing it successfully, and mixing in sessions at the Actors Studio, to the point where she thought she'd try her hand at the other coast in Los Angeles. She hooked on with the influential comedy troupe the Groundlings, which over the years has proved to be one of the top talent farms for NBC's “Saturday Night Live,” along with Chicago's Second City.

“I think Groundlings is geared more to straight sketch, really into character,” McCarthy said. “That's really close to my heart. I love that place.” In fact, she remains a member.

Yet it was off to the big time after she was spotted there and cast in “Gilmore Girls.”

“First show, first real shot at anything, and it lasted seven years,” McCarthy said. “I thought, ‘This is really easy.'”

A few lean years altered that attitude, although even then she was working on the sitcom “Samantha Who?” and a series of small movie parts.

Then came the chance to star in “Mike & Molly.” McCarthy jumped at it because the writing, by Mark Roberts and Chuck Lorre, who also did the CBS hits “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory,” reminded her of the same high-quality scripts churned out by Amy Sherman-Palladino on “Gilmore Girls.”

“We get a really good script every week, and I'm pretty critical,” she said. “The cast is great. Even when we were shooting the pilot, people were like, ‘It feels like we're shooting our fourth year.'

“The pressure is really off when you get a great script all the time. You just go out and play it.”

It hasn't hurt that they've been guided by legendary sitcom director Jim Burrows, and the combination has led to solid viewership at 8:30 p.m. Mondays on WBBM Channel 2, with more than 10 million viewers nationwide.

“I hope they like the show as much as I do,” McCarthy said. “I'm proud of it, so all I can do is root for it.”