Family lives, flaws and all By Debi Enker
Who are the most annoying people on television? The moronic contestants in Chains of Love? The exhibitionists of Temptation Island? Snarling Cornelia Frances, repetitively tongue-lashing the hopefuls on The Weakest Link? The hangdog Dawson Leery? How about Lily Manning, the nerve-wracked heroine of Once and Again? Played by Emmy-winning former model Sela Ward, Lily is like a bunch of raw nerve-endings twisted into an attractive-looking bouquet. Forever fidgeting with her hair and nervously licking her lips, Lily is guilty about her perceived failings as a mother to Grace (Julia Whelan) and Zoe (Meredith Deane), remorseful about the breakdown of her marriage to the unreliable Jake (Jeffrey Nordling), and alternately anxious and elated about her affair with divorced dad Rick Sammler (the almost too-cute Billy Campbell).
Like all of the grown-ups in Edward Zwick's and Marshall Herskovitz's drama series, Lily can be childish and she's chronically confused and uncertain. And like the show itself, she inspires mixed emotions. You can like and loathe Lily: be irritated by her hand-wringing, and yet happy for her in those cherished, elusive moments when things miraculously seem to go right: when she says just the right thing to comfort the sullen Grace, when (in a pretty good metaphor) the gingerbread house she's painstakingly baking and assembling for Christmas actually holds together, give or take a few cracks. Like all of the characters in Once and Again, she's flawed. She makes mistakes. She says stupid things and acts in ways that she later regrets. But she can also break your heart, as she did in the anguished scene on a snowy Christmas night when she confessed her infidelity to Rick.
Ward brings a finely nuanced texture of light and shade to Lily, and it's a depth that's common to all of the Once and Again cast, including the stand-out collection of teenagers. Zwick and Herskovitz are the canny producers who picked Claire Danes to play Angela Chase in My So-Called Life? and they really know how to cast kids. As Rick's son, Eli, Shane West turns a character who might elsewhere be rendered as a dim sports jock into a complex, sexy and sensitive teenager. And Julia Whelan's Grace is a fragile bundle of conflicting emotions: selfish, sulky, fearful, at once needing a hug and pushing the possibility of it away, she's an adolescent convincingly uncomfortable in her own skin.
Such full-blooded, multi-faceted characters are the show's great strength. These are ordinary (if rather good-looking) people - parents, grandparents, children, boyfriends and girlfriends - clumsily trying to do the right thing.
They stumble a lot. Often, the show resembles a messy dance of life choreographed to W.G. "Snuffy" Walden's warm, wistful music. Zwick has described the dramatic purpose of Once and Again as being "to hold a mirror up to life, which is not always the most flattering thing to do".
A pair of producers who also write and direct, Zwick and Herskovitz have built a body of TV work - which includes thirtysomething and Relativity - that resembles a multi-generational meditation on white, suburban middle-class life. Their TV world is one of comfortable homes and well-stocked fridges. It's a place of family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas, occasions where simmering tensions tend to explode.
As a domestic drama, Once and Again has a lot to offer, and it is evolving. When it began, the focus was the nascent romance between Lily and Rick, and the uncomfortable ripples their relationship sent through their respective houses.
Recently, the stories have broadened out and are spending more time developing the family around them.
No Mannings are in sight in the next episode, which screens on December 5. It is about the romantic entanglements perplexing Rick's ex-wife, Karen (Susanna Thompson), and Eli. Directed by Claudia Weill, it is a well-judged departure and captures the awkward, bittersweet relationship between mother and son beautifully.
The subsequent episode concentrates on Lily's sister, Judy (Marin Hinkle), her anxieties about being an unmarried woman in her 30s and a meeting that leaves her breathless.
In the US, Once and Again is in its third season. Viewers have seen the Mannings and the Sammlers struggling with death, divorce, pregnancy, marriage, mental illness, eating disorders and multiple financial and career crises. Here, following a brief false start in the middle of last year, we're 13 episodes into the 22-part first season.
This is not the kind of drama that is destined for broad appeal, and its creators know that. "Going all the way back to thirtysomething, we always knew that this kind of show was not necessarily going to appeal to everybody," Herskovitz has said. "But we just felt that there was a place to look at these issues of relationships and family life in a way that was penetrating and demanding. Our shows have never been big hits. We don't need them to be big hits. But people talk about them, are engaged by them."
It's true that this kind of drama isn't currently very fashionable. It's not a generic piece about crime fighters, doctors or lawyers. It isn't about telegenic twentysomethings in love. There are no dark avenging angels or warrior women. But with Once and Again, Zwick and Herskovitz have affirmed that they are masterful chroniclers of middle-class angst.
Once and Again returns on Wednesday December 5 at 10.35pm on Channel Seven __ www.theage.com.au (November 22, 2001)
