'Once and Again' saves the best for very last By KEN PARISH PERKINS
Once and Again closes its three-season run tonight amid loud groans from its faithful viewers. They're still ticked over what they consider cruel-but-usual punishment from the demented programming minds at ABC.
This intricately rich but ultimately ignored family drama never had a chance, they say, because its time-slot travels virtually killed any chances of enticing new viewers.
O&A was booted from Mondays for football, played musical chairs with NYPD Blue on Tuesdays, and each time sweeps rolled around the network hid it from view, like one would shelve ugly china. (At least ABC is consistent; tonight's finale falls 10 days short of May sweeps.)
Still, for a drama from Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, whose attention to the warped details of real life has been both the saving grace and downfall of their TV projects, O&A had a pretty long run. Longer than all their other series, except for thirtysomething, which made it four seasons.
O&A may very well find its way on TV critics' "best of" lists alongside Fox's 24 and HBO's Six Feet Under, but we can't ignore the fact, as painful as it might be, that ABC was more than generous with this ratings-poor series. But Herskovitz and Zwick simply refused to compromise their vision for this emotionally rich drama to score bigger ratings. And I, for one, am greatly appreciative.
Judging from the difficulty of luring viewers for the duo's other products such as the couple in distress Relativity, the teen in distress My So-Called Life and the yuppies in distress thirtysomething, it's clear viewers are less than thrilled with self-observations. They don't have the patience for a slower pace and rhythm, or dialogue that often sounds like real people talking.
Television teems with characters that are generally presented as cardboard action figures or wiseacres or saints or sex symbols without much wiggle room. This works for audiences because what's readily acceptable about stereotypes is that we know they aren't real and therefore they couldn't possibly be us.
But to do the opposite - to be unpredictable, to give characters gray areas, to take them, well, seriously - becomes tricky because these people are us. This is where viewers become uncomfortable; we see the truth, even when it contradicts the central characters' lives - and our own.
Divorce and blended family provide precisely the kind of emotional paradoxes on which Herskovitz and Zwick thrive. The core of the series was about divorced parents who meet and marry and struggle to figure out how to coexist with their respective teen-age children, former spouses and parents. More important, it's a genre we hadn't seen before: a slightly older relationship show, focusing on people 35 to 40 years old with children. It was one of the few shows on TV to actually deal with grown-up issues as opposed to those of single roommates in New York or shallow teen-agers in Los Angeles.
O&A dealt with eating disorders, homosexuality, infidelity and student-teacher relationships without being preachy. It infused these topics with the complexity and ambivalence they deserve, and often left them open-ended (another thing that might have frustrated viewers conditioned to having things wrapped up).
Call Herskovitz and Zwick's work navel-gazing all you want. I suppose some kind of defense mechanism is in order. But I'd rather call their brand of television fearless for offering up the complicated inner lives of the characters time and again, despite previous ratings difficulties.
Longtime O&A fans will find much to like in tonight's farewell, even though it's somewhat predictable and dramatically telepathic - it probably involves the most smiles by the most characters in any one episode of any Herskovitz and Zwick series. It's clear they had little time to sum this whole thing up.
Of the episode, I'll just say that love conquers all and despite its uncharacteristic conventionality, the final 1 minute, 40 seconds after the last scene is worth the hour.
Herskovitz and Zwick appear in the show's vintage black-and-white self-analysis scenes talking about people and product and how you can't be successful without having a rich tapestry of both.
The actors follow, talking about their O&A experience, most of them with watery eyes and postures that suggest they are trying their best not to lose their composure.
How fitting. To the very end, O&A was saying what it has always said: To fully enjoy this, you must be willing to have your emotional chain yanked every which way.
If only many more were so willing. __ Ft. Worth Star Telegram (April 15, 2002)
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