GO ASK DAD: 'Once and Again' hit home again and again

By RICK SHEFCHIK

As of Monday night, ABC's "Once and Again" became "Once and for All."

I'm sorry the show is leaving the air. I'm sorry prime-time television can't seem to make room - and keep room - for dramas that have nothing to do with people getting shot or people jumping into bed with each other with no moral ramifications.

People did jump into bed together on "Once and Again." (There apparently is no room on prime-time television for shows where people keep their feet on the floor and their pants buckled securely around their waist.) But at least the characters on "Once and Again" stopped and thought about it before, during and afterward.

That's probably what kept the show from ultimately attracting enough viewers. Too much thinking. Too much talking. Too much analyzing of everyone's desires, motives and resentments.

It was the little sister to last decade's "thirtysomething," also produced and created by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz - another show that featured an attractive, tortured cast of more or less normal people who thought and talked everything to death, including, eventually, their show.

For those who never watched it, here's a brief description of "Once and Again" (a title that probably cost them about a half-million viewers per night, since it does not stand out in your mind and was almost identical to the title of another show that I can't recall anymore):

Lily Manning (Sela Ward) was divorcing Jake when she met Rick Sammler (Billy Campbell), who was divorced from Karen. Lily's kids - Grace and Zoe - were going through the typical trauma of watching their parents break up, while Rick's kids, Eli and Jessie, were having problems of their own - in Eli's case, a marijuana habit, and in Jessie's case, anorexia and a sexual-identity crisis.

Meanwhile, Jake got Tiffany pregnant, and Karen fell for a younger man, dumped him, contemplated suicide and was almost killed in a car accident. Lily's sister, Judy, went through a series of bad boyfriends (a Zwick/Herskovitz specialty: the charming rogue who won't grow up); and there were also forays into Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, sexual harassment and business woes.

To be honest, it was rarely an uplifting show; even the holiday episodes - the big Thanksgiving meals, the Christmas gatherings - generally ended up with the turkey on the floor, somebody drunk, somebody screaming and somebody bolting out the door.

Maybe my wife and I enjoyed watching "Once and Again" because Sammler/Manning managed to make almost every other family in America look stable and wise in comparison.

But I think the main reason we watched it was that they so often hit the right notes about raising children. While the problems were extreme, the emotions seemed dead-on.

Grace, the 16-year-old, felt fat, ugly and talentless, even though to her parents (and the audience, who had to look at her as parents would), she seemed pretty, smart and talented.

Eli, who began the series as a basketball star, ended up working a series of dead-end jobs so he could keep his rock band and his marijuana habit going. Again, though his shiftlessness seemed a little out of balance to his intelligence, few parents could fail to relate to the fear of squandered potential.

There were nights when "Once and Again" seemed more like a "crisis of the week" than an evolving family narrative, but that's the nature of episodic prime time TV. They even tried a hostage crisis last season when the ratings were becoming a serious issue, but this year they went out with their head high, letting the drama flow from the normal (though heightened and stylized) tensions of everyday life.

When Grace made a move on her high school English teacher, it was uncomfortable to watch but done in a way that left no doubt about either the moral propriety of the situation or the possibility of it happening to someone you know.

That's what I'll miss most about "Once and Again" - the serious examination, through drama, of almost everything you hope won't happen to your family, and the knowledge that, if and when it does happen to you, you could handle it far worse than Lily and Rick usually did.__ St. Paul Pioneer Press (April 23, 2002)

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