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Western Exposure
The WB expands its family
practice
Date: 2003
Subject: Everwood
Article by: Nancy
Franklin
Source: The New Yorker
Issue of 1/20/2003
Credit/Thank You's: equineluv
Now that the phrase "jump the shark" has entered the culture and
given us a name for the point at which a TV series has peaked
and starts heading downhill—the phrase is a reference to the
episode of "Happy Days" when Fonzie, for some reason, attempted
to water-ski over a shark—we're all hyperaware of the moment
when things go sour (an element of preposterousness is often
involved) and our loyalty is severed. Most TV shows, unless
they've been prematurely cancelled, have a natural life span,
and yet we take their demise personally: here we are, willing to
show up week after week for years—how dare they decide to stop
working on our relationship! Then there are the inverse moments,
when a show unexpectedly succeeds in capturing our loyalty, or
at least in heightening our attention. (Right now, of course,
everyone's loyalty awaits deployment to the twenty-four-hour
news networks if there is a war—something CNN seems almost to be
gunning for, as it were, with the daily "Showdown: Iraq" hour
and its theme music full of fateful nervous energy.)
I had been watching the WB's Monday-night family drama
"Everwood" off and on since it began last September when such a
moment came, a few weeks ago. (The episode, it turns out, was a
rerun from October.) Two fathers—rival doctors in a small town,
whose teen-age children are friends—had driven together to
collect the two kids, who had gone AWOL from school one day and
found themselves out late, with no way to get home. En route,
each father spoke of how he would deal with his child. And then
each did the opposite of what he said he'd do—the hard-nosed
dad, who said that kids can smell fear in their parents and will
take advantage of it, let his daughter know that he was just
glad she was all right, and the dad intent on communicating with
his son was left mute when his son angrily brushed by him,
saying, "I'll be in the car." The men said one thing and did
another, and you believed both. It wasn't a huge moment, but it
was a complicated, memorable one that made you tip your hat to
the show's writers.
One of the better shows that premièred last fall—some of the
upcoming midseason replacements, at first viewing, already look
more promising than most of the series that came out of the gate
in September—"Everwood" was created by Greg Berlanti, who for
several years was the head writer and executive producer of the
WB teen drama "Dawson's Creek." Treat Williams plays its central
character, Andrew Brown, a world-renowned New York City
neurosurgeon, who performs miracles while neglecting his wife,
Julia (Brenda Strong), and their two children, the
fifteen-year-old Ephram (Gregory Smith) and the eight-year-old
Delia (Vivien Cardone). We get an idea of his arrogance at the
beginning of the first episode, when, during a consultation with
a patient, he looks at a brain scan and says, "Glioblastoma
multiforme. I like to call it the Great White of brain tumors."
He's Ahab, and he's going to get that sucker—and don't expect
him home for dinner. But when his wife dies everything changes,
and Dr. Brown suddenly realizes what's important. He decides to
move his family to Everwood, a small town in the mountains of
Colorado, and open up a free practice.
"Everwood" has a few things in common with "Northern Exposure,"
in that it's about a New York doctor in the boonies, but in
"Northern Exposure" the doctor wasn't there by choice, and
everyone in his town, including the town itself, seemed
pixilated. (Actually, the show's premise is closer to that of
last year's ill-fated "The Education of Max Bickford," the CBS
drama in which Richard Dreyfuss played a middle-aged college
professor whose wife died in a car accident and who was left
alone with their two children in his charge.) Everwood, the town
and the series, is more earnest, and often more sappy. The
show's opening credits include rough-hewn, sepia-toned drawings
of the actors, and the theme music has a soaring, Rocky
Mountain-high violin line. And many of the episodes begin and
end with a voice-over by Irv (John Beasley), the school-bus
driver and local fount of wisdom and loving-kindness—a device
that has yet to add anything substantive to the show but only
deflates it with spiritual gobbledygook. In one episode, Irv,
talking about the beauty and utility of plants—the local florist
has just died—says that they are "God's most alluring foot
soldiers." At the end of another episode, he waxes
teleological—you know, the whole giveth-and-taketh-away thing:
"When things are working right in the universe, a loss of
innocence is usually followed, in time, by an increase in
humanity. Time is funny like that. For everything it robs us of,
it grants us something." Honey, giveth me the remote. (Beasley
plays a more articulate version of the Michael Clarke Duncan
character in "The Green Mile." It seems to be the lot of black
actors of a certain age and build and voice to play blue-collar
workers who also happen to be holy.)
Once you get past "Everwood" 's homiletic aspects, though, the
show has some real charm. The WB has almost cornered the market
on a particular kind of family series that appeals to teen-agers
and, to some extent, to their parents, and, in some cases, to
both at the same time—"Gilmore Girls" is the rare show that
almost-teen-age girls will allow their mothers to watch with
them. The shows are wholesome, but they don't, for the most
part, pander, and they appeal to that part of all of us that is
still trying to figure out and possibly repair our own family.
(If you care to have an extended wallow in unconventional family
life à la the WB but are busy on weeknights, you can settle in
for a three-hour block of reruns of "Smallville," "Everwood,"
and "Gilmore Girls" every Sunday.) In a way, a
suddenly-single-parent drama like "Everwood" has a dramatic
advantage over the intact-family scenario, because the children
and the remaining parent are forced to come smack up against
each other—they can no longer hide in the convenient bustle and
hum of everyday family dysfunction. And, to make things worse
for the kids (but better for the viewers), it's always the
"wrong" parent who dies—at least, this is what the kids can be
counted on to say at some point when the surviving parent is
feeling most vulnerable and inadequate.
Ephram, Dr. Brown's son, is wonderfully played by the
nineteen-year-old Gregory Smith. He, as much as, if not more
than, Treat Williams, is the heart of the show. Williams is
beginning to grow on me, but his face, with its hooded brow, is
hard to see into, and the distracting Wooly Willy beard that his
character sprouted upon arrival in Everwood at first made
watching him an effort that interrupted your pleasure and
concentration—like having to look for a golf ball in the woods.
Ephram is in love with Amy Abbott (Emily VanCamp), and she is
drawn to him, too, but she already has a boyfriend, Colin, who
happens to be in a coma in a Denver hospital, after a Fourth of
July joyride with Amy's brother ended in an accident. (In last
week's episode, Colin came home—he was operated on successfully
by the amazing Dr. Brown—but now he can't remember anything or
anyone, including Amy.) Ephram is in pain, and it shows all over
his face, and in the way he moves. If you saw him walking down
the street, you'd think, That boy needs a mother, and you'd want
to pull him toward you. His very guardedness is expressive, and
despite his efforts to armor himself—you can see him close down
in self-protection when he's around his father—the rage and the
sadness and the sweetness come through. Smith looks like a real
teen-ager, too, not a TV one; he's neither geeky nor bright-eyed
and buff.
The other pleasant casting surprise of "Everwood" is Tom
Amandes, who plays Dr. Harold Abbott, Amy's father. Dr. Abbott
has an unfortunate personality—his way of welcoming Dr. Brown to
Everwood is to tell him that he's in his parking space. He goes
out of his way to make sure that he'll be disliked, and then he
worries about being disliked. He wrestles with his prickliness
and rigidity; and when he manages to override his own worst
instincts—the sarcasm, the stubbornness (both of which are
pretty amusing, actually)—he has a real sparkle. He has a nice,
crackly voice, too; I'll bet he does a good Jimmy Stewart
imitation. In what might be considered too neat a twist, his
mother, Edna (Debra Mooney), an entertainingly crusty,
motorbike-riding old broad, works as Dr. Brown's nurse. And
she's married to the saintly Irv.
With its mildly quirky overlay, "Everwood" also sometimes
recalls "Picket Fences," which was set in a quirky small town in
Wisconsin. (Berlanti, who is thirty, has said that that show and
"Northern Exposure" were two of his favorites.) "Everwood" may
have a formula, but it doesn't lean on it too heavily; it uses
the formula well, as a way of getting at the characters'
emotions. Someone told me, the other day, that he had watched an
episode of "Everwood" but was embarrassed to admit it. The WB
should take that as good news: when you feel embarrassed by a
show, you almost always come back for more.
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