My So-Called Relationshipsomething: Once & Again

By James Koonce --
If there's anything that all this TV-watching teaches us, it's that love is never easy. Not as a teenager, certainly not as an adult, and once you get into the married-with-children stage, you can pretty much forget about it. Should you be so foolish as to try to fall in love after that, well, you're so far adrift that you'll never make it back. It's like F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "there are no second chapters in American lives." Guess that goes for American love lives too.

Or not. ABC's new drama Once & Again strives to show us that adults past the age of forty who have been through divorces are just as viable as anyone else in the courtship rodeo when they get back in the saddle. (At least they are if they look like stars Sela Ward and Billy Campbell.) And it's deeply encouraging. Campbell plays Rick Sammler, a divorced father of two who's more or less come to grips with his solitary existence, content to steer his kids on the path to well-adjusted adulthood. Until he meets Lily Manning (Ward), herself a freshly separated mother of two, and gets those old familiar butterflies in his stomach, and begins to think that maybe there's romantic hope for him yet. Lily, not yet legally free of her marital entanglement, is considerably more neurotic about the notion of dating a man after sixteen years with her husband (and only eight months apart), but also gets the hots for this hunky guy, practically in spite of herself.

So from their first meet-cute (following a soccer accident involving Lily's teenaged daughter Grace, played by Julia Whelan), they're goners for each other. We know it, ABC knows it, everybody knows it except these two, who fumfer around the obvious as they try to screw up the courage to ask one another out. But finally they do, and they begin to understand that the pleasures of relationships need not be denied them just because as romantic commodities they've been bought and returned, so to speak. And all the while we hear their private thoughts and concerns (asides in black-and-white, delivered to an unseen entity; is it us? A therapist? God?) as they try to make sense of the torrent of feelings they're having after such a lengthy dry spell.

It works. Ward and Campbell are both enormously appealing as they bare their souls and try to lay the foundation for a new wing on their lives. Emotional pitfalls aside, they have practical realities to deal with as they forge ahead with their burgeoning relationship, such as how to keep their families on an even keel without turning into the Brady Bunch. Lily's elder daughter Grace in particular resists the notion that her mother might have a love life of her own, especially since she, as an adolescent, is experiencing the very same hurricane of hormones, only without the vantage point to look back and be able to identify what it all means. As a result Grace walks the line, making more of a brat of herself than she really means to - she's by turns girlishly hopeful enough to want things back as they were with both parents in residence, and mature enough to know that it isn't going to happen. Rick's son Eli, by contrast, couldn't be more delighted that his dad is finally getting back in the water. Of course, he's the school stud, a handsome, strapping young man to whom girls are naturally attracted (truth be told, Grace among them). So he finds it fitting that his dad's an inductive chip off the younger block.

To complicate the issue, Rick's and Lily's former spouses are orbital but important characters in the mix as well. Marriage as a partnership may dissolve, but parenthood as one never completely does. Rick's ex-wife Karen (Susanna Thompson) rides Rick about making sure Eli hits the books when he's at dad's house - the kid may be popular, but he's no Rhodes Scholar. In doing so, she comes across as perfectly sensible, and we see why Rick would have been attracted to this woman once upon a time, and we see the core of their former relationship.

So Rick finds himself in the uncomfortable but reasonable position of having to be the bad guy to his enthusiastic son, forcing him to play less and study more, thereby endangering the peaceful balance he's achieved with the fellow male in his household. Similarly Jake (Jeffrey Nording), Lily's soon-to-be-ex and not necessarily a bad father in his own right, enjoys a favored status by Grace, making it even harder for Lily to move forward with Rick. There's a scene in which Rick and Lily are about to get physical (a fleeting freedom since the kids are shipped off to Jake's for the night), when the door opens and in walks Jake, Grace and sister in tow. The ensuing argument might be emotionally scarring for all involved, but Jake is the only cookie-cutter schmuck character in the entire piece, strutting about in his leather jackets and bragging about his conquests with twenty-five year olds, so the scene ends up feeling benignly soapy and artificial - not nearly the source of dramatic impact it might otherwise have been.

Which still isn't a bad average for a premiere episode. Creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick certainly know their way around the family/marriage/children/relationships zeitgeist after thirtysomething, and they've tapped a hidden wellspring of potential, zeroing in on a virtually-ignored demographic on the television landscape. What will be interesting to see in the coming weeks is just how far the characters go together, how fast, and what changes they leave in their wake. But sight unseen, it's still nice to be reminded that, when the jaded cataracts of relationships past are removed and replaced with the clean lenses of fresh hope, life really is beautiful.__rickontv.com (September 23, 1999)