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TV season made us feel like a million bucks


BYLINE: Drew Jubera -- (snipped non-OandA stuff, which ended with comments about NBC's "The West Wing")

Less comfy, but no less effective, was ABC's "Once and Again," the latest chronicle from those baby boom Boswells, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz ("thirtysomething," "My So-Called Life").

"Once and Again" was a hot boomer soap opera dressed up as middle-class insight. Its genius was in admitting that they're the same thing.

Sela Ward (as separated-with-kids Lily Manning) and Billy Campbell (divorced-with-kids Rick Sammler) were the dimple-chinned faces all divorced-with-kids fortysomethings wish they had _ or were with. Slinking last season over to the WB's "Felicity," for some teasing sex after TV's youthquake briefly wiped them from the screen, boomers found that Lily and Rick's teenlike gropings let them throw off Noel and Ben and Julie and feel young again, on their own terms.

Did I say young? I meant dirty.

For the most part, Zwick and Herskovitz were annoyingly dead-on; the guilt, the panic, the exhaustion of divorced parents was displayed in such keen-eyed, almost poetic detail, that it spoke to the whole universe of adults whose lives haven't turned out quite like they'd figured.

Rick: "I always had a map for my life. And now, it's like I walked off it entirely. It's weird."

Maddening as she could be, Ward's character was the season's most evolved female -- older, divorced, kids, and still attractive to attractive men. The fact that she really is a knockout was beside the point -- Lily's glow came less from her gorgeous, Sprint-spokeswoman hair than a kind of midlife incandescence. Lily craved both intimacy and sex while lashed to a world of car pools and visitation exchanges and dying parents.

Ward was one slim rung further along the network evolutionary ladder than Amy Brenneman, who created a winningly heartfelt role as a harried juvenile court judge and single mom in CBS' "Judging Amy." And Ward was two rungs ahead of Kathleen Quinlan, who gave a harder, more L.A. edge to her lawyering single mom in CBS' "Family Law."

All three were welcome leaps ahead of Sydney Hansen (Melina Kanakaredes), the prodigal plastic surgeon returned home in "Providence," last year's surprise chick hit on NBC. Dr. Syd was a start -- she gave the networks permission to build dramas around adult female leads. Still, the fear before this season was that all women would be like her: TV smart but not one teaspoon more.

Surprise: The smarts of this season's women weren't dumbed down. And guess what? We fell for them. Hard.

(more non-OandA stuff "snipped")