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Television facing facts about divorce
San Jose Mercury News - November 16, 1999
BY ELLEN GRAY
Knight Ridder News Service
HERE IN America, some 50 percent of marriages end in divorce.
Over 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 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's "Judging Amy" and
"Family Law" and ABC's "Once and Again," to boys-will-be-boys sitcoms like ABC's "Oh Grow Up," CBS's "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.
Look, there's more
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 whose name she won't
disclose, but 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.' "
Each situation different
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.
A woman's point of view is what you'll get in "Judging Amy," where executive producer Barbara Hall grafted aspects of her own life to that of star Amy Brenneman's mother, who, like
Brenneman's character, is a judge in Connecticut.
"I was a single mother for a while," Hall told critics. "I got divorced when I was 35, and that was my experience, and I wanted to relate that a little bit. That it's not the end of
the world."
Copyright © 1999 San Jose Mercury News. All rights reserved.
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