'Once and Again' deserves a place in prime time

BYLINE: Phil Kloer, Staff -- You don't just watch an episode of " Once and Again" ; you survive it. Death, divorce, sullen teenagers, difficult parents, economic insecurity, sexual infidelity, job stress --- it's push-the-boomers' buttons time, writ large but writ well.

Gee, and it started off as such a nice little romance.

When the ABC drama debuted in September, it drew a major audience for the story of Rick (Billy Campbell), a cleft-chinned, divorced architect who always knows the right thing to say, who met and wooed Lily (Sela Ward), a 41-year-old separated mother of two who looked like a former Wilhelmina model but was still very believable, very identifiable, as a middle-aged woman who really needed to be wooed by a sensitive, cleft-chinned architect.

They made love in Episode 2, but since then their on-screen love life has been pretty dismal --- they've been too busy fouling off life's curveballs. But Rick and Lily's loss has been viewers' gain, as "Once and Again" has morphed into a rich, challenging meditation on modern families.

It has also become The Sela Ward Show, as her Lily (who can look drawn and worried and still have fab cheekbones) has become the hub, and everyone else --- even Rick --- a Lily satellite. (Heck, all of TV has become The Sela Ward Show. She starred in a CBS movie last week, has a Lifetime documentary called "The Changing Face of Beauty" coming Sunday, and then there are those damnably ubiquitous "Nickel Nights" phone commercials she does.)

Last week Lily's father died of a stroke, and tonight we get the funeral, the shiva (a Jewish period of mourning) and the kind of messy complications that make " Once and Again" so delightfully squirmy. It turns out that Lily has to cope with a mentally handicapped brother who's in a group home, and the turbulent feelings of her young daughters, who react to everything like insect antennae, and a fiendishly complicated financial-emotional situation with her almost-ex-husband, Jake, involving the restaurant jointly owned by Lily, Jake and her parents.

When it's over, you'll have watched an hour of television that will leave you and your box of Puffs Super Plus empty. This is fun? This is escapism? Not even, but it's intense.

Viewers seem to be ambivalent about such intensity, however. "Once and Again" started with Nielsen ratings that put it in the Top 10. But between its move to Mondays in January and the darkening and deepening of the series, the ratings have been falling, from almost 17 million when it debuted to less than 10 million in February sweeps. Last Monday's episode showed an upward bounce, though, and ABC is pleased that it wins its time slot among 18-to-49- year-olds, the age group advertisers most covet.

The knock on "Once and Again" is that everyone is whiny and self-absorbed, which was the same knock on ABC's "thirtysomething" a decade ago, and it isn't any more true now than it was then. Of course, both shows are from the same creative team, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of middle-class narcissism.

"Once and Again" has evolved into "thirtysomething" with an extra decade of wear and tear. You could sense the similarity in the first weeks, but in the last month it's become inescapable. They even imported Miles Drentell, the Mephistophelean boss from "thirtysomething," to torment poor Billy for a few episodes.

But in "thirtysomething" the kids were young and peripheral; on "Once and Again" they've muscled onto center stage, particularly Grace (Julia Whelan), Lily's 14-year-old daughter. Bright, gawky and insecure, unconventionally beautiful but painfully unaware of it, a trial to her mother but with a soul to treasure, Grace is the most fully realized adolescent on television since Angela in "My So-Called Life" (whaddya know --- another Zwick-Herskovitz show) .

Whelan is so good that viewers don't notice how good she is; people just assume she is Grace, when really ABC should be putting up billboards touting the most promising young actress discovery since Claire Danes in "Life."

The future of "Once and Again" is uncertain. ABC likes it, but network execs cancel shows they like all the time if they don't clear the Nielsen bar. If all television were like this, we'd bug out. But there ought to be room for an hour a week for a show so steeped in integrity.__Atlanta Journal Constitution (March 13, 2000)