'Once and Again' displays winning ways

By Manuel Mendoza --
Rick's nervous, like a teenager on the make for the first time.

A fortysomething architect - divorced with kids - he's met a woman in similar circumstances. Their mutual attraction is almost instant. (It doesn't hurt that she's played by Sela Ward and he by Billy Campbell.)

With their respective households roiling around them, Rick steals away to the bathroom to call - as his children refer to her - "the mom." The whole time he's on the phone with Lily, he's wincing, holding his head, tapping his hands and feet.

"I was just wondering if, if it wouldn't be strange for you, if um, if I could, if I was to buy you a cup of coffee, dinner or something like that? Would that be weird, being parents in the same school?"

It is weird, and it's not. That tension between what is expected if not demanded of single parents and what they still want for themselves is the theme of Once and Again, a new ABC series that marks the return of thirtysomething creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick to the subject they know best: the outer and inner lives of suburban boomers.

"I watched his body language, and it was so tortured," Mr. Herskovitz says of Mr. Campbell during the phone-call scene. "He was in such terror. This was the real man in some sense investing that moment.

"I told the cameraman, 'Let's just put a longer lens on it and grab those hands and grab those feet.' It wasn't something that we planned. It was a universal moment, but it came very specifically out of what Billy was even unconsciously feeling at that moment."

That kind of attention to the small ways in which people reveal themselves is one of the trademarks of these longtime collaborators, who also produced My So-Called Life and Relativity. In a fall season rife with teenagers and arrested adolescents of all ages - often in absurdly contrived situations - Mr. Herskovitz and Mr. Zwick don't outsmart themselves trying to outsmart us.

"When we're stuck, one thing that we often ask ourselves is what would really happen, not what serves the dramatic truth or what is convenient to the plot or what is maybe the wish fulfillment, but what is really true," Mr. Zwick says in a three-way phone interview with Mr. Herskovitz. "And often what is really true is so deeply interesting when you tear it apart and you come to understand its underpinnings.. . . It's endlessly more interesting than anything that you could ever invent or devise."

ABC has heavily promoted the show, and it's apparently working.

Debuting last week in NYPD Blue's coveted Tuesday-night time slot - where it will continue to air for six more weeks - Once and Again drew 16.8 million viewers, making it fall's first potential new hit. Critics, including this one, have loved it as well.

ABC has also taken the unusual step of setting up a deal with Lifetime. The cable channel will repeat episodes of Once and Again three days after they initially run on the network.

If it turns into a bona fide smash, it would be a first for Mr. Herskovitz and Mr. Zwick. They have never had a big commercial success before, though, granted, expectations are lower in the new world of 157 channels. The limited audience for their style of drama is usually blamed on the closely examined angst of their characters.

"It's hard to be a conscious human being who has known anything of the psychological history of the 20th century and not understand that anxiety, such as it is, has been common to every sophisticated culture long before Freud," Mr. Zwick says in their defense.

"I think people who use that word tend to be people who are embarrassed by it as well," Mr. Herskovitz adds. "It's such an odd canard to level at someone."

Angst and all, Once and Again is the best new series of the season. Besides the veracity of the writing, the show has all kinds of things going for it, including wonderful performances from not only Ms. Ward and Mr. Campbell, but the young actors playing their kids, especially Julia Whelan as Lily's self-conscious daughter, Grace, and Shane West as Rick's academically challenged son, Eli.

There are also meddling ex-spouses to contend with and, to contrast the idealized couple, Rick's office mate David (Todd Field) and Lily's sister Judy (Marin Hinkle), the show's resident cynics.

In Tuesday's even better second episode, their remarks about the war between the sexes play against each other, back to back, like an unreliable Greek chorus that nonetheless echoes what many people think.

"Men say they like it when women call," Judy tells Lily. "They're lying."

"She called? That's very cool," Todd says. "When a woman calls, that means she wants to have sex."

The story line, paralleled by Rick's son's pursuit of a girl at school, is about the doubts and games that follow the giddy blush of first attraction.

Should Lily sleep with Rick so quickly? Can she? What about a condom? If he thinks it's OK for his son to have sex, why can't it happen under his roof? Who's this other woman who keeps popping up? Is she Rick's ex-girlfriend? Is he sleeping with her? Can he be what Lily needs him to be? When will he know when it's time to take charge?

Like Ally McBeal, Once and Again might draw the ire of feminists who could see it as an endorsement of traditional gender roles. But it's not that simple - or simplistic.

"Yes, we unabashedly believe that women need men, but we also unabashedly believe that men need women," Mr. Herskovitz says. "His side of this equation is just as strong in that way and just as conflicted. We're always interested in the ambivalence of human beings."

(rest of the article "snipped")__The Dallas Morning News (September 28, 1999)