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Divorce jolts what's left of Pleasantville
Bergen Record - October 26, 1999
By ELLEN GRAY
Special from the Philadelphia Daily News
Here in America, some 50 percent of marriages end in divorce.
In the parallel universe that is TV Land, the stats aren't so clear. Nearly four decades after widower Steve Douglas started bringing up "My Three Sons," death, not decree, still parts
many a TV couple. Soap operas may be awash in sympathetic divorced characters -- and evil twins -- but until fairly recently, the prime-time exceptions stood out. "The Odd Couple,"
"Maude," and the fighting Furillos of "Hill Street Blues" all brought divorce into the open without really stemming the tide of dead mothers and fathers.
Even "Rhoda," whose title character eventually split from her husband, was a spinoff of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," in which Moore was originally slated to star as a divorced
woman, a choice that CBS ultimately considered too controversial in 1970.
Not so, apparently, in 1999: Divorce, or its aftermath, is a centerpiece of more than a half-dozen new shows, ranging from so-called "chick shows" like CBS' "Judging Amy" and
"Family Law" and ABC's "Once and Again," to boys-will-be-boys sitcoms like ABC's "Oh Grow Up," CBS' "Ladies Man," and Fox's "Action."
A paramedic's divorce -- and her relationship with the police officer ex-husband she frequently runs into in the course of her workday -- is a recurring plot point on NBC's "Third
Watch," while the WB's "Popular" is, typically, trying to have it both ways, bringing its two main characters together because one's divorced dad is marrying the other's widowed
mom.
And in a season where the adage "write what you know" seems to have been taken more seriously than usual, a midseason replacement series on ABC features a main character who moves into a
hotel after leaving her husband and falls in love with a considerably younger room-service waiter.
That really happened to Betsy Thomas, the 33-year-old co-creator of "Then Came You," who earlier this year married the former waiter, a still struggling actor who's about seven years her
junior.
"When we split up, my ex-husband would not leave our house," Thomas told TV critics. "He said, 'You want to separate. Then you need to go somewhere else. I'm not leaving.' He
actually suggested that I could stay in the guest room, which I thought was maybe a bad idea and so I had no choice" but to move into a hotel.
And yes, her ex has seen "Then Came You," even if viewers won't until later in the season.
"He said he thought it was really funny," Thomas said. "And then I asked him, 'Did you laugh?' And he said, 'Oh, no. But if it weren't about me, I would have laughed.'"
Situations like that may have been what Marshall Herskovitz hoped to avoid when he and writing partner Edward Zwick ("thirtysomething," "My So-Called Life") set out to tell the
story of how divorce affects two families in ABC's "Once and Again."
Herskovitz has been divorced, but "the issues of divorce and of relationships have so many different vicissitudes that you don't have to draw up on the particular details of your life,"
he told critics. "And also, I respect very much the privacy of my children, of my ex-wife, of my friends," he said.
Zwick, who describes himself as "the child of divorce," indicated he and Herskovitz were interested in mining the subject, not their personal lives.
"It's not about the facts of the thing, it's about the truth of the thing. And I think that's what we're trying to go for," he said.
"Family Law" co-creator Paul Haggis took a slightly different tack.
"I went through a very difficult divorce for a long time, as did my ex-wife and my kids," he said. "And I tried to look at it actually from her point of view as much as mine, and
from the kids' point of view, and have empathy for everyone else who has gone through a divorce."
Copyright © 1999 Bergen Record Corp. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 Philadelphia Daily News. All rights reserved.
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