MATH AND OTHER PROBLEMS, ADDING UP TO MODERN LIFE

BYLINE: Diane Werts --
'ONCE AND AGAIN gets it right. Again. Tonight's 10 p.m. second-season opener (on WABC/7) redraws the fine lines of the concentric circles ever shifting this way and that among the characters. Their best intentions intersect like the math problems bedeviling ninth-grader Jessie tonight as she moves up in school.

And in personal growth. Her family complications are tough enough - Jessie's dad, Rick (Bill Campbell) dating divorced mother Lily (Emmy winner Sela Ward), who has kids of her own, who have different opinions about Jessie (Evan Rachel Wood), her dad and life in general-but now a new school, too?

Too many houses, too many faces, too many things to worry about and ways to screw 'em up. Personal diplomacy is this show's drama, and you can practically smell the permutations in tonight's strong hour written by show creators Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, and directed by Herskovitz. Their two Chicago clans wade waist-high through the swamp of life as Rick and Lily decide to bring their relationship out of the closet and onto the living room sofa where God knows what the kids'll see and think. Their "divorced parents' logistics hell" plays counterpoint to the kids' vivid versions of Hades, as 10th-grader Grace (Julia Whelan), too, faces the new-friend prospects of Jessie now in her school and a bold new gal-pal just out of rehab.

The kids feel like they're getting dragged along in adult traffic, and the parents want their own space on the road to somewhere. "We're both doing the best we can," Rick and Lily agree, and that's where they intersect with us. Their hectic lives take shape on the phone, too, and in moving cars, as Zwick and Herskovitz convey contemporary anxiety in the keen way that won them loyal fans for "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life." Those two shows' generations come together here, as " Once and Again" illustrates that universal consolation offered tonight by Ward's character: "I know this is complicated." Boy, don't we all.__Newsday (October 24, 2000)