Intensity of "Once and Again" Suits Ward

By Tom Walter

All Sela Ward had to do was preface her lines with "Yes."

Simple enough, except during one take of this particular scene, she prefaced it with "Lord."

Well, Lord, yes.

For an actress raised in Meridian, Miss., and who went to the University of Alabama, she has learned to leave her Southern accent behind. Sometimes, though, she just slips into Southern. And she knew it. "Is 'Lord' too Southern?" she asked Richard Kramer, who wrote this episode of Once and Again, which will air this Wednesday night on WPTY-TV Channel 24.

"I think that's a little too Southern," he agreed.

"You people don't say 'Lord'?" she asked with mock bewilderment.

A few reporters had come to the Once and Again sound stages to take a look around and talk to the folks responsible for one of the best shows on television.

"Sound stage" - with its accompanying image of studio back lots filled with entire neighborhoods of false fronts, actors and actresses in costume and the ghost of Humphrey Bogart a palpable presence - is putting it politely: The series films in a dreary office park, in a building that in another life probably was a warehouse.

The scene being shot is a conversation between Ward's character, Lily Manning and her daughter Grace (Julia Whelan), and was taking place late at night.

That meant we got to see, and interview, Ward while she was wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved cranberry colored top.

Tough job.

It was the middle of the day, close to lunchtime, and people's concentration might have been lagging a bit. It's not difficult to see how that can happen.

Scenes are shot over and over again, then shot over and over again from different angles. Each time the action moves from one place to another, the lighting has to be changed and made just right.

It all takes time, though television moves at supersonic speed compared to feature films. This scene, which occupies less than two minutes on screen, took all afternoon to light, rehearse and shoot. That's fast.

The same axiom applies to TV shows and films: The most exciting day on a set is your first day. The most boring is every day after that.

The part of Lily Manning is the role of a lifetime for Ward: When the show began last season, Lily, a mother of two, was recently separated from her husband. She met, and fell in love with Rick Sammler (Billy Campbell), a divorced father of two.

This season, they plan to marry. But their lives are complicated endlessly by demands of work, children who are suspicious of the new people in their lives, and ex-spouses who clash about how to raise the children.

Old wounds heal slowly on this show, new joys are accepted warily, and every relationship creates ripples in a pond, in which every little thing affects everything else.

It's a lot like life, and that may be why the show is struggling in the ratings. It is doing middling well, and in what couldn't be a good sign, was pre-empted the last night of sweeps in favor of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

The show comes courtesy of Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the team responsible for thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, two of the most intense shows of recent past.

Intensity has its fans. It also has its detractors.

But its fans tend to be situated in the right places. Count Stu Bloomberg, co-chairman of ABC Entertainment Television Group, as one.

"It drives us crazy that a broader audience hasn't come to this gem," he said in a recent interview. "Marshall and Ed write a type of show that is personal drama, slice of life, holding a mirror up to our lives so brilliantly. . . . But it doesn't have those big promotable life-and-death stories."

It certainly had one recently, when a crazed employee took hostages at Lily's ex-husband's restaurant, including her daughter Grace.

Such boom-boom episodes are the exception. The heart and soul of the series remains the relationships among the characters, always intense, often filled with small but meaningful moments.

It's hard to promote small and meaningful. But if it's an acquired taste, it's a bonanza for the actors.

"I've never had material so suited for me as an actress, to really show many, many facets of my ability, for lack of a better word," Ward said during a break in the shooting of her scenes. "The level of the writing, it doesn't get much better."

That's courtesy of Zwick and Herskovitz.

"One of their strengths is they recognize young writing talent and nurture it," Bloomberg said. "Great writers want to work there."

Kramer, for instance, was a producer on two of their previous series, and wrote the Once and Again episode last season that introduced Lily's mentally ill brother, Aaron (Patrick Dempsey). This particular episode brings Aaron back, and Kramer agreed to write the episode - and hang around the set more than usual because his brother Richard was directing his first episode of the show.

But Zwick and Herskovitz help shape every story line, at least, and write some episodes themselves. (And act as well. Zwick has appeared as a counselor in the show, and according to Evan Rachel Wood, he had to audition for the role. Wood is the actress whose character, Jesse Sammler, he is counseling.)

In any event, TV shows and TV characters tend to take on lives of their own.

"We have a relationship with the characters and we have a relationship with the actors who play the characters. Those relationships interact with each other often in very interesting ways," Herskovitz said.

As a for-instance, he remembered that Patricia Wettig was upset after the second year of thirtysomething. A couple of plot lines didn't work out, and Wettig was left with little to do all season.

"She came to us at the end of the season very upset, and we were galvanized to remedy the situation. So when we were able to give the character cancer, she was very happy," Herskovitz said. "This is a constant juggling act to figure out how to serve all these characters and yet keep a story moving forward and find sort of important dilemmas for each of these people," he said.

"And not have it devolve into soap opera," Zwick quickly added. "We're trying to give some imitation of life. There's a great dilemma. If you make too much ado about little, you appear to be whining. If you make too many things happen, you're reduced to melodrama, and we exist between those two pitfalls."

On Once and Again, the two executive producers have discovered a vulnerability in Campbell and a sense of humor in Ward they didn't know about going in. Such traits help shape stories.

The interviews took place on a basketball court next to the school corridor set. Back on the darkened sound stage a few feet away, it was easy to get turned around: In the space of a few thousand feet, you're walking through an entire universe: bookstore flows into kitchen, which flows into architect's office, which flows into bedroom, which flows into Internet magazine office.

It's a small, intimate world, and not for everyone. In fact, it drives some people crazy. Whiny, indeed. But when it hits, it hits hard. It can be as true, as painful, as joyous as life itself, and it's a rare TV show that can do that - or even tries to. __ The Memphis Commercial Appeal (March 18, 2001)