'Once' More, With Feeling: New complications lead to an emotional series finale By Diane Werts
ONCE AND AGAIN. Intimate ABC family drama concludes its three-year run. Tonight at 10 on WABC/7.
IT'S STILL TOUCHY-FEELY. Those who have loved ABC's "Once and Again" and those who have loathed it will find this family drama sticking to its ultra-emotional guns in tonight's series finale, culminating three seasons of interpersonal angst, self-exploration and earnest love.
As the show began in 1999, the characters played by Sela Ward and Billy Campbell were separately launching new lives as single parents in the wake of their divorces. Starting a new life remains the point 62 episodes later, though the concept has by now extended to their former spouses, their siblings, their kids, their friends and the local Little League coach.
Campbell's architecture business is thriving and Ward's radio career is burgeoning, and tonight the newly marrieds are each offered exciting opportunities that, of course, conflict. "This is all too good to be a problem," he says. But what would "Once and Again" be without them? At the same time, Ward's ex-husband (Jeffrey Nordling) and his baby girlfriend (Ever Carradine) face their own joy/crisis. Campbell's ex-wife (Susanna Thompson), who has endured the trials of Job this season, including depression and being hit by a car, finds herself at a "pretty serious reassessment" of her own path. Even Ward sibling Marin Hinkle is looking down the road with current squeeze and Campbell business partner Steven Weber.
Their entanglements may seem too tidy to be believed. But "Once and Again" devotees willingly suspend skepticism to savor the sensitivity with which series creators Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz examine the intricacies of human connection. Spouses who want their own way. Adults tugged between responsibilities to lovers and to kids. Teens searching for identity. Folks afraid to take emotional chances, or too eager to. People who learn from their mistakes, or don't.
The important thing is, they're all trying to get along and grow. And trying hard - which is precisely the perspective that's been trying in an entirely different sense for viewers made uneasy by such naked exposure of feelings and friction.
Those heart-to-heart tearjerk moments just keep coming tonight. It shouldn't spoil anybody's enjoyment to say the endings tend to turn out happy. (Even if in the need to wrap things up, the kids seem a little overlooked and the grandmother suffering of late from Alzheimer's barely gets mentioned.) What else would we wish for these characters after sharing so much?
That bond is capped by show- ending black-and- white confessions to the camera - not by the characters, but by the performers behind them and the series creators behind them, telling what "Once and Again" has meant to them. They're candid, confused, overcome, direct. They're out there in all their sloppy emotional essence as a coda to a series that, like the creators' previous "thirtysomething," wore its heart on its sleeve, its chest, its face. These characters felt real. True, sometimes stubborn, misguided, obtuse and exasperating. But real in all their too-human detail.
How many shows probe what to do with such intense feelings? And give us hope that we, too, might figure it out? Who knows when such a show might come around once and again? __ Newsday (April 15, 2002)
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