The Search for One Real Man Stops Here

Millions of American baby boomers who grew up watching “The Brady Bunch� got married, then divorced, only to find that their domestic landscape didn’t resemble television’s cheerfully brain-dead example of a second marriage. There’s a modern model on the air now, one that manages to be as appealing and hopeful as “The Brady Bunch� was in its time, while tripling that show’s IQ and emotional intelligence.

“Once and Again� quickly earned the support of its network. The drama premiered on ABC in September in the venerable “NYPD Blue’s� perch, angering “Blue’s� fans and producer Steven Bochco, who felt jilted. “Blue� has reclaimed its turf, and after a month’s hiatus, “Once and Again� returned last Monday with 10 new episodes, at 10 p.m., its new time slot.

The title is self-explanatory, minus a few proper names. Once upon a time, Lily and Jake and Rick and Karen fell in love. Then, after both couples had split up, Lily and Rick met and fell in love. Again.

That’s it. Except, in the real world, that isn’t it. It--life after divorce, including new romance--is a bittersweet blend of guilt, regret, fear and exhilaration that the series explores with an accuracy that can sometimes be as uncomfortable as a splinter under the skin. Falling in love again is so much more complicated than the song lyrics indicate, once his kids and ex, your kids and ex, everyone’s parents, friends and enemies and a few suitcases full of memories crowd into the bedroom.

The tale that series creators and executive producers Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (“thirtysomething,� “My So-Called Life�) have chosen to tell is one in which Rick and Lily zoom from zero to 60 in a heartbeat. For all the jaded singles who long ago stopped believing in lightning bolts, these 40-year-old lovers stand, scorched and smiling.

In its early episodes, “Once and Again� all but dispensed with the hesitation, doubt and agonizing anticipation that marks so many courtships. On his first date with Lily, Rick believes--as surely as he knows that he must breathe oxygen--that there will be no more worthless evenings with an infinite array of Ms. Wrongs.

Rick and Lily, thoughtfully played by Billy Campbell and Sela Ward, experience what Herskovitz calls “attachment at first sight,� and in a refreshing repudiation of current sexual correctness, they sleep together on their third date. (Take that, Dr. Laura!) Many of you out there--raise your hands, please--let lust rule and headed for bed on the first or second date, then went on to build long-lasting, multifaceted relationships. And the highways are littered with the withered hearts of lovers who waited months to get to know each other before having sex, then discovered they didn’t like each other much after all. The fact is, the length of time between attraction and consummation just isn’t a very reliable predictor of relationship longevity.

Yet true love is, and “Once and Again� offers the promise of post-heartbreak passion.

After Separation,

a Chance at Romance

Zwick says: “There is a very deep and essential element of wish fulfillment at the heart of this. We are interested in the notion that those who have exploded their lives, or whose lives have not worked out as they might have imagined, can find themselves in a place where they’re reckoning with the death of dreams and the pain of separation, and can still find a second heaven.�

Some viewers who go to bed alone after the show’s end credits roll might grumble that it’s a fantasy. After all, that must have been some epic lightning bolt Rick was hit by. In one of the episodes that is as much about parenting as about their affair (each of them has two children), he tells her he’s willing to give her daughters the time they need to get used to his presence in their lives. He says that what he won’t do is let anything get in the way of his and Lily’s relationship moving forward. His certainty could boil water.

Perhaps such adoration is an ideal, but not an inappropriate one, in the show’s context. Only among people opening restaurants or launching Internet businesses does hope spring more eternal than it does in the realm of romance. And just when were stories of love anything but hyperbolic? Before Romeo and Juliet? Before Noah and his wife got along swimmingly all those months on the Ark?

Arguably, the most alluring fantasy element of “Once and Again� is Rick himself (at least for the female audience). The sensitive guy that mid-20th century feminists revered ultimately became an object of ridicule. But no matter how many Alan Alda jokes about men in aprons have been told, an emotionally articulate male is still the Holy Grail for many women. That’s why they watch soap operas. In that medium, men are “in touch with their feelings,� expressive in a way that few real men are. On the soaps, men have an instinct for verbalizing exactly what a woman wants to hear at the moment she needs to hear it.

In the second episode, after the new duo bump into one of Rick’s ex-girlfriends, Lily questions how much of his attention she can really expect to claim, when other women are obviously interested in him. “I’m going to sound like an idiot saying this,� he tells her, “but from the moment I saw you, I didn’t want anybody else. I didn’t care about anybody else.�

A man who knows what’s in his heart and isn’t afraid to reveal it: Rick is Soap Opera Man! He has made the quintessential Soap Opera Man declaration--beginning with a self-deprecating apologia, he then utters the most romantic statement possible in the situation, making himself simultaneously vulnerable and irresistible.

Campbell doesn’t see his character as having easy access to the right answers. “He doesn’t really always know the perfect thing to say,� the actor says. “Rick is just a person who is muddling through. He’s just being himself and is struggling. Anybody who’s struggling to say the truth is far more attractive than someone who just throws out a pat answer.�

The amusing glibness that was part of “thirtysomething’s� charm isn’t a major element of “Once and Again,� and its absence is a tribute to the versatility of Herskovitz and Zwick and their writers, many of whom contributed to that show. But even if Rick is occasionally bumbling, with a directness that seems authentically guileless, he is still the antidote to every immature, self-absorbed, commitment-phobic, sexually predatory man known to womankind.

Intimate Confessions

During ‘Interviews’

By virtue of an innate decency that he and Lily both have, he’s sometimes Soap Opera Dad too. The show has consistently been saved from sappiness by focusing on Rick and Lily’s respective children. Even Lily’s younger daughter, who clings to her belief in Santa Claus, is sometimes as knowing as her environment demands.

In an episode that aired just before Christmas, Rick’s 16-year-old son Eli (Shane West) displayed that post-pubescent male phase when all his mother has to do to spark intra-familial thermonuclear war is say, “Please pass the salt.� The boy criticized his mother, but Rick brooked no maternal disrespect, and angrily defended his ex-wife. Even in the heat of battle, he says the noble thing, the thing that will make his son a better man.

A stylistic choice that has been present from the beginning distinguishes the series further. At various points in every show, one character or another is shot in black and white, speaking directly to the camera. Their confessions are often more intimate than dialogue could ever be.

Herskovitz and Zwick refer to the black-and-white interludes as “the interviews.� They grew out of a rehearsal technique they both have used as directors for years. Zwick explains: “We will create a situation in which an actor will respond to questions, in character, about his character. We’ve used that with every television ensemble cast we’ve put together. We’ve used it in movies too. It had always been an effective exercise.� Now it’s a storytelling device that maps psychological candor as “Once and Again’s� territory.

Everyone has a favorite interview moment. At the end of the pilot, Rick talked about how it’s been three years since his divorce, and how he always thought he’d find someone else to love. “ . . . And there isn’t anybody else and I didn’t really bargain for that. I just think that if somebody knew that I didn’t want them for them, but basically because I was scared to death of being alone, I can’t imagine why they’d want me.� Sigh.

The interviews are a kind of narration, delivered by a narrator the audience can see. Zwick and Herskovitz view them as a counterpoint to the action, or an opportunity to visit a character’s history in a way that clarifies the present.

The first scene of Lily and Rick making love is intercut with an interview with her. At one point, she just looks into the camera, then looks away, not saying anything. “The silent moments in the interviews get me the most, actually,� Herskovitz says.

The interviews have helped the show expose layers of meaning, illuminating what Zwick calls the “de-idealization process� Rick and Lily are going through, as they’ve moved past the first blush of sexual frenzy. They’ve been effective in revealing the subtle ways the new world order divorce bedevils children who generally seem well-adjusted, like Rick’s mostly angelic 12-year-old daughter Jessie (Evan Rachel Wood).

Lily’s 14-year-old daughter, Grace (Julia Whelan), solidly on the other side of the puberty bridge, could give comfort to any mother who ever felt a Medean impulse. “Some people perceive Grace as bratty and insolent and others understand her to be in the throes of a convulsive adolescent hallucination,� Zwick says. In an interview, Grace explains it all: “My mom worries that I’m depressed or anxious. She doesn’t understand that that’s a rational response to high school.�

Americans are attracted to symmetry in architecture and design, cause and effect in drama--as if they are comforted by a sense that the world is ordered and rational, even if that’s an illusion. Herskovitz and Zwick find characters who are flawed compelling. The quirky, questioning adults of “thirtysomething� were quickly labeled whiny because they complained about their complex lives and relationships. Lily would have been a more traditional romantic heroine if she’d thanked her lucky stars for delivering Rick and left it at that. Instead, she questions what’s beneath the surface, especially her own.

“The cause of people’s unease with what we do, at times, is there’s something threatening in the description of ambivalence,� Zwick says. “That flies in the face of some long-held notions about how characters who are supposed to be exemplary should be portrayed. We’re interested, in fact, in the epic struggle of lives in which mistakes are made and ground is gained and lost.�

Herskovitz adds, “People are particularly discomforted if a character acts weak or too emotional, or makes a mistake. That was true with ‘thirtysomething,’ 12 years ago, and it’s very interesting how uncomfortable that makes people still.�

Rick’s Response

to Lily’s Confession

Knowing that, he and his partner offered a cliffhanger Christmas show in which Rick catches Lily in a lie, then she tells him about her one-night stand with her ex. When all that must be forgiven is a clumsy fib, he is a bubbling caldron of longing, as wounded by the rift the mistake caused as if it had been his fault. But when the rest of the truth hits him, Rick is finally not Soap Opera Man at all. He is silent, angry and sulky. At the hour’s end, it isn’t clear whether Lily’s done the right thing, and in the process, lost him.

The Christmas episode was Lily’s finest hour, when she stands in splendid contrast to all the gamy, manipulative, rules-following women that life and television have portrayed. She has no energy for the clever move, the proper strategy to hold onto her man. Like Elvis Costello’s Alison, her aim is true.

There is that moment of revelation in a failing marriage when someone realizes, “If I stay here, I will become the sort of person I don’t like.� For Lily, that would be a woman who tolerates and perpetuates deceit. When she would rather risk losing Rick than become everything she despises, she emerges as more than the warm Momma Bear we have come to know. She earns our love and respect.

As much as many of the feelings Rick and Lily share are adolescent, in the best, silliest and most intoxicating sense, in the crucible of her own betrayal, she is guided by life experience and maturity in a way that could give emotional baggage a good name.

* “Once & Again� can be seen at 10 p.m. Mondays on ABC. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).