I've been meaning to write about Everwood, ever since it came back from no-confidence hiatus. I've been intermittently obsessed with the show since it debuted, after 7th Heaven, back in 2002. At the time, 7th Heaven was my show, and Everwood was the equivalent of something like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation -- if I did not flip off the TV before the show started, I would find myself sitting through the entire hour, wondering why I was watching. (This was shortly before 7th Heaven became unwatchable, after the producers had Shannen Doherty'd Jessica Biel and her character, Mary Camden, and replaced her and several other castmembers with bland surrogates.) The 7th Heaven-Everwood one-two punch made for a treacly yet comforting Monday night.
Since excising John Beasley's folksy voiceovers, Everwood has cut the treacle to almost nothing while keeping the poignancy. An average episode can reduce me to tears and make me useless for the rest of the evening. There is a certain value to this. Everwood is also very funny without being self-conscious or particularly meta, unlike certain other teen dramas I could name.
What makes Everwood unusually poignant, these days, is that we don't know yet whether or not it's going to make the jump to the CW. It seems like there's a lot of conflicting information being passed around: Everwood's numbers are down and it was not part of the initial list of shows people agreed were certain to survive, but CW promotional material reportedly contains clips from the show. That is the big story this spring for fans of a lot of current WB and UPN shows. Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill all appear to be on the bubble; from week to week, the information about each show's prospects changes.
Everwood is one of the four or five gayest shows currently on the schedule. Creator Greg Berlanti and company seem to have mastered the particular variety of gay subtext peculiar to the WB and described by posters at Television Without Pity as "ho-yay." Several of the relationships among male characters (especially Treat Williams's Andy and Tom Amandes's Dr Abbott), while not explicitly romantic, are intimate in such a way as to leave a lot of room for speculation.
Last night's episode was explicitly gay: Ephram (Gregory Smith) figured out that Kyle (Steven R. McQueen), the kid he's been mentoring all season, is struggling with sexual identity issues. The whole episode was pretty effective and ended especially well, with Ephram using his reaction to Kyle to talk to his own father about their thorny relationship.
Meanwhile, As the World Turns's gay storyline has completely devolved. I haven't posted about this in weeks because almost nothing has happened and what has happened has been ridiculous and boring. When last we left off, Jade was blackmailing poor, closeted Luke into pretending to sleep with her, for reasons too idiotic to try to explain -- I tried once before, not wholly successfully. Luke had an attack of the vapors, because of all the pressure inherent in the whole situation. Then all the Snyders and Jade vanished for a long time, while other storylines took front burner, and As the World Turns spent two episodes alternately celebrating and desecrating its 50th anniversary. When we checked in with them again, Lily had installed Jade in her grandfather's ranch, for no clear reason other than to facilitate Jade's inevitable seduction of Holden. Luke is further than ever from coming out of the closet, responding to Jade's increasingly dismissive behavior with completely unconvincing threats that he will come out to his parents, as soon as he's feeling better.
I can't remember when we last saw Lucas, over on General Hospital. I don't care, though, because Tristan Rogers is due to return as Robert Scorpio on Thursday's episode. -- Peter
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