Wonde year

Three of the best shows on TV feature richly detailed portraits of believable young people

By Don Aucoin -- If the life of your average preteen or teenage kid were a TV show, there would be no shortage of storylines.

There's first love, of course, often followed by first heartbreak. School corridors are filled with rival cliques that carry on like Montagues and Capulets, and daily life is charged by collisions with parents and other authority figures. On a regular basis, kids taste the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat on the soccer field, in the classroom, or on the dance floor. All of this, of course, occurring in a context of excruciating self-consciousness.

In short, puberty and adolescence furnish no end of raw material for drama, not to mention awkward slapstick moments of comedy (that are not usually a laughing matter at the time). Oddly enough, though, television has historically shown only sporadic interest in the dramatic and even comedic possibilities of those turbulent years, largely relegating preteens and teenagers to supporting roles in family programs.

This season, though, kids occupy center stage in two of the best new shows on television: NBC's ''Freaks and Geeks'' and Fox's ''Malcolm in the Middle,'' and are playing an increasingly prominent role in another new gem, ABC's ''Once and Again.''

Outwardly, the three programs don't have much in common. ''Malcolm in the Middle'' is a gonzo comedy, ''Once and Again'' is an introspective relationship drama, and ''Freaks and Geeks'' is a quirky hybrid of sitcom humor and emotional poignancy.

But what the three share is a gallery of richly individual portraits of believable kids - unlike, say, the miniature adults who inhabit teen soap operas such as ''Beverly Hills 90210'' and ''Dawson's Creek,'' or the superwoman fantasy of ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' - and an honest effort to look at an often-confusing world from a youthful point of view.

Not so incidentally, all three programs feature some of the most talented and appealing young stars to light up the small screen since the mid-1990s heyday with the likes of Fred Savage (''The Wonder Years'') and Claire Danes (''My So-Called Life'').

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To 10-year-old Meredith Deane, who plays Zoe Manning on ''Once and Again,'' it's only logical that stories spotlighting the younger characters have begun cropping up more and more in what began as a show about middle-aged love. After all, Deane said, in her age group ''there's so many things going on. There's the transfer to middle school. There's divorce. There's all kinds of preteen issues for girls.''

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Looking back and ahead

In interviews, the creators of the three new shows - baby boomers all - said they were drawn partly by the opportunity to portray youngsters more realistically, and partly by the chance to create stories that comment on their own youth or on the lives of their children.

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[Linwood] Boomer [creator of 'Malcolm in the Middle'] said adolescence is fertile terrain for comedy or drama because it's ''that time when you've got all the physical powers of an adult, and none of the common sense.''

That duality can lead to pratfalls, as in ''Malcolm,'' or it can lead to intense soul-searching. That's where Edward Zwick comes in.

Zwick, along with fellow ''thirtysomething'' creator Marshall Herskovitz, helped pioneer the teen-angst genre with ''My So-Called Life'' in 1994. The program made a star out of Claire Danes, who played 15-year-old Angela Chase, and legitimized teenage life as the stuff of serious drama, with plots involving guns in school, the harassment of a gay student, and Angela's sexual awakening.

But ''My So-Called Life'' lasted only half a season before being canceled. So when Zwick and Herskovitz began writing ''Once and Again,'' a drama about the romance between two divorcees, they knew from the start that the program would place increasing emphasis on 14-year-old Grace and 9-year-old Zoe Manning, the daughters of Lily Manning, and on Rick Sammler's two children, 16-year-old Eli and 12-year-old Jessie.

''We felt there was still a lot more to say,'' said Zwick, 47. ''To be the parents of older children, as both Marshall and I are, and to spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking and talking about that: We wanted to write about it.''

Besides, he added, adolescence is a universal experience with which viewers can identify. ''In every life, not only in a writer's life, those years have a kind of lasting resonance,'' he said. ''Witness the number of people who evoke high school as the seminal moment, even sometimes the defining moment, of their lives. It's a time when everything is amplified: your passions, your fears, connections, alienation. You're in a kind of hormonally induced hallucination.''

They need an audience

In recent weeks on ''Once and Again,'' little Zoe learned that her parents were getting a divorce on Christmas Eve at the same moment she made another devastating discovery. Virtually an entire episode was devoted to Eli's attempts (ultimately unsuccessful) to find a sensitive way to break up with his girlfriend. On numerous episodes, the children's uncertainty and tentativeness is matched and mirrored by their parents' own faltering attempts at romance: a subtle reminder that in some ways, we all remain teenagers.

But as good as these shows are, they won't survive long without an audience. For instance, ratings are ominously (and inexplicably) low for the irresistible ''Freaks and Geeks''; it currently ranks 103d out of 154 shows.

''Teenagers loved `My So-Called Life,' but it could not draw older viewers,'' observed Alex McNeil, the author of ''Total Television.'' ''You have to have another segment of the viewing audience.''

Whatever Nielsen has in store for them in the long term, the fact that ''Freaks and Geeks,'' ''Malcolm in the Middle,'' and ''Once and Again'' are on the air is heartening to Robert J. Thompson, author of ''Television's Second Golden Age.''

''These blue-chip creators have finally begun to realize that this is a great place to tell American stories,'' said Thompson.

''It's amazing it took television so long to figure out we shouldn't be doing just cop shows or hospital shows or detective shows,'' he added. ''The clash between generations in the year 2000: I can think of few stories that are more interesting, more potentially dramatic, and more universal than these stories.''__Boston Globe (February 13, 2000)