The Subtle TV Drama Found in Silence and Rue

By Samuel G. Freedman --
WHEN Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz began developing the drama series "thirtysomething" almost 15 years ago, they gathered a group of writers to propose story ideas. "What if Hope got raped?" one asked, referring to a central character. The two producers were appalled, not by the prospect of reckoning with a sexual assault on network television but by the notion that it could be handled plausibly in a single episode. In real life, they said, the effects of such a crime would rumble for years.

In a certain way, that discussion prefigured the Zwick-Herskovitz partnership's latest project, "Once and Again," which begins its second season on ABC on Tuesday at 10 p.m. Instead of a rape, "Once and Again" had its genesis in a different sort of calamity, the dissolution of two marriages. And rather than showing the pyrotechnics of separation and divorce, the show began with their aftermath, especially the cautious love affair between two now-single parents played by Billy Campbell and Sela Ward, and gradually traced its ripples through the concentric rings of each family.

The subtle intimacy of "Once and Again," like "thirtysomething" before it, has deeply divided critics, with Caryn James of The Times hailing the show last year as "one of the new season's most polished, accomplished series" even as Tom Shales of The Washington Post was disparaging it as a "sensitivity training session in drama drag." What is undeniable to proponents and detractors alike is the show's willful avoidance of television drama's standard devices in favor of an almost total reliance on intricate writing.

Shows as rightly acclaimed for dialogue and character development as "The Sopranos" or "E.R." can also fall back on what Mr. Zwick calls "the `code red,' the `officer down,' those franchise elements." Even as cerebral a series as "West Wing" ended last season and began this one with the attempted assassination of the president. "Once and Again," in contrast, traffics in awkward silences, private snubs, articulate half-truths and a rueful sort of humor that shares more in common with observational stand-up comedy than with sitcom punch lines.

"In many ways, we're a response to what television is," said Winnie Holzman, 45, who wrote for "thirtysomething" and created "My So-Called Life" before joining the staff of "Once and Again." "I watch a lot of TV and I love `The Sopranos,' `West Wing,' `Sex in the City.' But I guess we all feel there isn't a show doing exactly what we're doing. It isn't about huge, earthshaking events. It's about smaller people and the smaller moments of their lives. In the end, it's about how people's minds work."

The attention to both linguistic and physical detail permeates not only the televised episodes of "Once and Again" but the material viewers never see or hear — the story meetings between producers and writers, the handwritten editorial comments on draft scripts, the stage directions. Outside of the History Channel, there may be no place on television other than "Once and Again" to hear a character compare a building to a "ziggurat" and not bother to define the term for those uninitiated in Mesopotamian architecture.

For Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz, the road to such a distinctive style starts with the selection of staff writers. Their choices for "thirtysomething" and the initial season of "Once and Again" included the playwrights Joseph Dougherty ("Digby") and Michael Weller ("Moonchildren"), Ms. Holzman with her experiences as actress and librettist, and Richard Kramer, author of numerous short stories.

"What we look for in a writer is as complex as what you look for in a friend or a lover," said Mr. Herskovitz, who is 47, in a recent telephone interview from the show's production offices in Culver City, Calif. "It's not just one thing. It's a voice. It's a humor."

Mr. Zwick, 48, who also took part in the interview, picked up the thought: "A complex view of the inner life. Some attempt to prise and understand it. And to be willing to endow ordinary life with some epic or mythical understanding."

Put another way, the producers and writers tend to share a distinct literary sensibility. Asked to name their influences, they mentioned such staples of popular entertainment as the Marx Brothers, Burns and Allen and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" — but also the playwrights Strindberg and William Inge, the short-story master Raymond Carver and, most frequently, Chekhov, whom Ms. Holzman described as the "god of the subtle gesture that reveals the entire life."

The writers for "Once and Again" — who this season are Ms. Holzman, Liberty Godshall, Jan Oxenberg, Lynn Seifert, Emily Whitesell and the husband- and-wife team of Dan and Sue Page — rarely meet as a staff and never write by committee in the usual Hollywood manner. Instead they work independently with Mr. Herskovitz and Mr. Zwick. Before the dialogue for a given episode gets committed to the page, before even an outline is devised, writer and producers talk at length about the biographies and motivations of their characters, elements that may never be presented on screen but are meant to inform every performance. Mr. Zwick approvingly quotes a writing teacher's admonition that "plot is the meat the burglar throws the dog to get over the fence."

The Pages found that method a striking departure from their experiences in sitcoms. "In the writers' room, you'd have all these people craving attention, trying to make each other laugh," said Mr. Page, who is 35, in a joint telephone interview with his wife from their home and office in the Los Angeles area. "We've been in situations where we were put down because we spent time on back-story. It was seen as a waste of time. It's been more challenging this way, but it's incredibly liberating, too, that we can move at a pace where we can explore the little movements instead of having to jump from huge moment to huge moment."

To cite one example, Ms. Page recalled a story meeting with the two producers that largely consisted of discussing how Rick Sammler, the divorced father portrayed by Mr. Campbell, was affected by the fact that his father had died during Rick's boyhood. Ms. Holzman remembered spending hours discussing not the couple at the show's center — Mr. Campbell's Rick and Ms. Ward's Lily Manning — but the ex-spouses of each. For the show to succeed, she believed, "Those exes had to be very human, not just someone you wouldn't get caught dead with."

As such ruminations take written form, Mr. Herskovitz and Mr. Zwick scribble critiques that concern psychology as often as structure. On the cover sheet of the script for a forthcoming episode, one advised, "Lily is drawn devoid of irony, self-mockery or generosity of spirit." In an episode the two men co-wrote for the new season, they describe Rick's mother thus: "The Presbyterian rectitude of her upbringing has given way to a buoyant, even exuberant openness to the improvisation of life."

The abiding concern of the producers with subtext has led to some criticism of the Herskovitz-Zwick shows for focusing inordinately on the anxiety of the affluent. One commentator dismissed "thirtysomething" as so much "pesto and angst." And Mr. Zwick's films — especially "Glory," the saga of a black unit in the Civil War, and "The Siege" — have concerned themselves with precisely the political issues and bloody events that his television series have generally avoided.

Yet the appeal of "Once and Again" to its adherents — its audience last season ranged from 10 million to 17 million viewers an episode — resides in that same restraint and minimalism. During an episode in the coming season, after Lily feels slighted by Rick at a business dinner, she castigates him for "that silent-thing look, that editorial look." Toward the end of last season, Lily's father, Phil, had a stroke and died. Neither of those moments appeared on the screen. Instead "Once and Again" limned the drama through events on its periphery — Lily arguing with Phil shortly before his stroke about her ex-husband's role in the family business; her daughter Grace rehearsing lines from a school play for Phil in his hospital bed; the decision by Phil's wife and daughters to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order.

When "Once and Again" turns wry, it operates with a similar kind of understatement. In an upcoming segment, one of the teenage children in the series matter-of-factly says of a high school classmate, "She's really nice for someone who just got out of rehab." In another episode scheduled for early this season, the book store run by Lily's sister, Judy, tries to pump up business by creating a matchmaking club called "BookLovers," in which each participant wears a tag designating his or her favorite volume. At one point, a woman identified with "The Rules," a dating guide, tries to start a conversation with a man who selected "Christ in Concrete," Pietro DiDonato's proletarian novel about an Italian-immigrant construction worker.

That particular detail, scripted by Ms. Holzman, partly paid homage to her father, who venerated the book. And it partly attested to the show's belief in its own aesthetic. "I always remind myself to explore the little turf that we're on," she said. "In our show, that's all that matters. If what's going on emotionally doesn't ring true or isn't interesting, we have no show. There's nothing else to lean on."__The New York Times (October 22, 2000)