'Once and Again' hopes for a miracle BY MIKE DUFFY

4 / 4 stars

It's tough to put on a happy face when fate is kicking you around.

And while Susanna Thompson's emotionally bruised character on "Once and Again" has been having a miserable year, the actress also knows that the exquisitely drawn ABC family drama is in deep peril.

Off the air for the past seven weeks, "Once and Again" finally returns to the ABC schedule at 10 tonight for what is sure to be its last shot at survival. If the ratings don't zoom upward, the show's a goner.

"It's such a strange time right now," Thompson says. "Even talking about it feels like abandoning ship."

"Once and Again" is an achingly intimate and affecting portrait of divorce as seen through the eyes of adults and children. It's the sort of classy, intelligent series that fairly screams "Quality TV!"

That may have been part of its problem.

Executive producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who previously explored the human condition with brittle wit and bittersweet subtlety in "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life," don't make conventional, lowest common denominator television. They take chances; they create layered characters with flaws who don't always behave the way they should. There's a painful honesty to the anguish some of their characters experience occasionally.

Just ask Thompson, who has been giving one of the season's most intensely pure and impressive acting performances as Karen Sammler.

"I didn't want to just play someone's image of a bitter ex-wife," said Thompson. And she hasn't.

"Once and Again" tells the story of Rick and Lily Sammler, played by Billy Campbell and Sela Ward, divorced parents who fell in love and got married. But the show's real emotional depth and artful stories have grown from the tangled relationships of all the people in Rick and Lily's life -- their children and former spouses.

"I'm just so attached to 'Once and Again,' " says Thompson, sounding fretful about the future.

This season, Karen fell into a deep depression and was nearly killed in a shocking auto accident during the last episode, which aired in early January. And Thompson has delivered a haunting, Emmy Award-worthy performance.

"Karen is one of many of us who has had to push through her days, to get up in the mornings feeling a low-grade depression and not even knowing what it is," says Thompson. "She's a person who has had dreams for her life. Some of that has fallen into place as she thought it would, but in other ways, it didn't happen.

"She got to a place and said, 'Is that all there is?' "

Passionate fans of "Once and Again," who gather online at such sites as www.saveoanda.com or www.oandafans.com to organize their efforts to pressure ABC to renew the series, are surely asking the same question.

By returning the series to Monday nights, where it drew its biggest audiences during its first season, ABC is clearly hoping for a minor miracle. Viewership declined from 10.9 million to just 6.3 million over the past three years. A fourth season is unlikely. And ABC, despite giving Zwick and Herskovitz the creative freedom to make great television, bear some of the blame.

The series has been bumped around the schedule six times to five different time slots. Moving it to Friday nights last fall proved disastrous. And ABC's promotion of the series has been lukewarm and spotty.

Meanwhile, Susanna Thompson isn't giving up.

"I refuse to be pessimistic. I don't want to say it's gone until someone tells me it's gone," she says. "I want to hold on to the possibility of hope." __ Detroit Free Press (March 4, 2002)

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