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You can go home again -- on TV
Baltimore Sun - November 28, 1999
By David Zurawik
Sun Television Critic
The success of shows like 'Providence' and 'Judging Amy' may reflect the hidden longings of the aging baby boom generation.
The taxi cab pulls up in the driveway of a rambling, ivy-covered, two-story Cape Cod painted picket-fence white.
Leaves are falling from ancient oaks and elms as a young woman gets out of the cab, looks at the house and takes a deep breath as if trying to inhale it all.
"Enjoy your visit," the cab driver says as he pulls away.
"Not visiting," the woman replies. "I think I'm home."
The scene is from the pilot for "Providence," the surprise hit of last season. The drama about a plastic surgeon in her 30s who chucks her lucrative Beverly Hills practice and Malibu
lifestyle to return to her hometown of Providence, R.I., and a low-paying job in a community clinic is so popular that it has inspired copycat dramas like "Judging Amy" on CBS this fall.
"Amy" features a 35-year-old attorney who chucks a corporate law career and Manhattan lifestyle to return to her hometown of Hartford, Conn., and a low-paying job as a family law judge.
Like "Providence," it, too, is a hit, the highest-rated new dramatic series in a fall full of successful new dramas.
While much has been written about the commercial success of the two series and their leading characters, Dr. Sydney Hansen (Melina Kankaredes) and Judge Amy Gray (Amy Brenneman), the cultural
implications have been little explored. When a series cuts as directly against the grain of what's come before as "Providence" did, and then single-handedly inspires a programming trend,
it's a fairly safe guess that something is up.
This was supposed to be a network season geared to 20-somethings living in New York and oversexed teen-age boys not coming of age in their parents' basements. But the crash and burn of series like
NBC's "The Mike O'Malley Show" and ABC's "Wasteland," set against the tremendous success of "Providence," "Amy" and several similar series, has sent the
networks scrambling to find what makes Sydney and Amy run.
Ultimately, the answers are found among baby-boomer viewers and the fantasies the series offer them -- starting with the promise that you can go home again, a theme both series hit hard this past
week in Thanksgiving episodes.
Striking a chord
"I think you've got to go home at some point in your life," says Brenneman, who stars as the judge and single mom who returns with her daughter and moves into the family house with her
mother, Maxine (Tyne Daly), and brother (Dan Futterman).
"I know for me a lot of my 20s was about going off and proving that I wasn't like my mother -- I was so different, I wasn't going to be anything like her. And, then, you fall flat on your
face, because you're exactly like your parents. I think the appeal is connected to that process, which involves going back, which all of us go through."
Barbara Hall, who wrote the pilot episode of "Judging Amy," also believes the appeal of the series is connected to Amy returning home. As she sees it, "At 35, Amy has to go home to
sort of finish growing up, to learn some lessons she might have missed. And so, it's really a starting over for her."
Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, agrees that the appeal is in part connected to the idea of returning home, but he thinks
these series have a deeper pull.
"Not only are they coming home to the place where their parents live and where they grew up," Thompson says, "what also matters is that these are New England homes. This is the
place of Norman Rockwell, turning leaves, the smell of cookies at Christmas. I mean, I can almost smell the pies baking when I watch these two shows."
As Thompson explains, "This is not just going back to the womb of their families, this is going back to the womb of America. Where did [Henry David] Thoreau go when he wanted to get back in
touch with his transcendental roots? He goes to a Massachusetts pond. That's pretty close to where Amy and Syd go."
Gender is another important aspect of these characters. It's noteworthy that both are professional women, and that their journey back home seems to go directly against the dominant narrative for
prime-time women starting with the CBS sitcom "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in 1970.
The "Mary" story line featured a career woman leaving her family and hometown, going off to the city and finding a new family in the workplace. In fact, Mary's last words to her
co-workers, just before they turn off the lights for the last time in the WJM newsroom, were: "I thought about something last night. What is a family? A family is people who make you feel
less alone and really loved. Thank you for being my family."
The "Mary" tale has been repeated endlessly on prime-time television the past three decades. Two seasons ago, NBC had a full Monday lineup of such shows, ranging from "Caroline in
the City" to "Suddenly Susan," which it promoted under the banner of "Women Who Work."
There was a connection between the success of shows like "Mary" in the 1970s and women entering the work force. The question is whether there is a similar connection between the success
of the returning-home narrative today and what women are feeling.
"Given television's seeming inability to show a truly independent woman, you have to wonder why it is only women who return home in these shows," said Shirley Peroutka, chair of the
communication and media studies program at Goucher College. "But, in terms of what it might be reflecting in a more direct way, I would look to the idea of adult children returning home with
several generations living under the same roof."
"Judging Amy" executive producer Barbara Hall said showing several generations living together was one of her goals: "What we wanted to do was show an extended family that
way."
Hollywood producers and media analysts say another aspect must also be considered -- namely the relationship between television and baby boomers. They cite the fact that new dramas featuring
female characters in their 20s and targeted at younger viewers -- like NBC's "Cold Feet," ABC's "Wasteland" and Fox's "Time of Your Life" -- are foundering.
"God knows Hollywood and this country worship youth, but the baby-boom generation is also getting older and older, and what they want to see on TV is important to the discussion, too,"
said Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator of "Once and Again," a drama about two single parents in their 40s who fall in love. "Once and Again," starring Sela Ward and Billy
Campbell, is the second most popular new drama of the network season.
On one level, the success of the older characters might be simply a matter of baby boomers want-ing to see people like themselves on the screen, as with "Once and Again." But Herskovitz
and his partner, Ed Zwick, believe it goes deeper than that.
"The baby-boom generation, as we know, was the first generation to ever go to college," Herskovitz says, poking fun at the boomer-centric viewpoint that has driven so much of popular
culture since the 1960s. "So we redefined that. And the first generation ever to have children. And now we're going to be the first generation ever to get old."
"So, it's going to become very hip to be old," Zwick adds.
Thompson, too, points to boomer-centricity in his analysis, saying that what each of the new dramas offers is a fantasy for baby boomers connected to reliving their youth. " 'Providence,'
'Judging Amy,' 'Once and Again' -- these are all stories about 17-year-olds in the bodies of 35- or 40-year-olds," he says. "The shows take these characters and re-infantilize them by
having them go back home, back to the place of their birth, back to their parents in some cases."
The shows re-teen them, anyway. One of the most memorable hours of "Once and Again" this year featured Ward's character, Lilly Manning, fantasizing, fretting and obsessing for a week
over her forthcoming first date with Rick Sammler (Campbell).
"They've written something that celebrates age, that celebrates that at 40 there is life," Ward said of the story from Herskovitz and Zwick. "At 40, you can have the same feelings
and emotions and expectancy that you had when you were 19 and 18 about life."
The very first scene of "Judging Amy" finds Amy refusing to get out of bed on the morning she is supposed to start her new job as a judge. She hides under the covers until her mother
comes and pulls her out of bed, scolding all the while as she sets out a freshly ironed set of clothes, including her judicial robe.
No series, though, did a better job of merging boomer and teen identity in its leading character than "Providence" did with a dream sequence in its pilot.
New identities
It is just after dawn, and a woman is standing on a bridge over a river that runs through the middle of the city. She is looking down through a mist that sits like a shaggy quilt on the silent
water. Suddenly out of the mist comes an oarsman in a one-person shell. He is handsome, strong and so graceful in his strokes that the boat seems to be sliding on glass.
As she squints down to get a better look at him, the scene shifts and we now see a younger version of the woman in a high school letter jacket standing below the bridge waiting for a teen-age
version of the man at the oars to reach the shore. As she reaches to help him out of the boat, their hands touch, and they kiss.
The woman is Sydney, and the river, which she visits regularly, has come to serve as a metaphor for memory in "Providence." There is wisdom in what "Providence" has to say
about the way our memories -- especially from our teens and 20s -- shape us as we grow older.
The notion of boomer fantasies also explains the success of the new CBS sci-fi-based drama, "Now and Again," starring Eric Close and Margaret Colin. The pilot opened with an overweight
and depressed middle-aged insurance executive (John Goodman) getting killed in a freak accident on the very day he got passed over for a big job. But the man's brain, replete with memory, is
"saved" by the government and put in the bionic body of a handsome 26-year-old (Close).
"You have to admit, this is a fascinating story -- this relationship between baby boomers and our culture," Thompson said.
"You have a generation that was defined by its youth and rebellion, that peaked very early during the Vietnam War when the youth movement and campuses were front-page news. And then all of
sudden they've got these kids and they're the parents, and they're the establishment that their kids are rejecting.
"And we see all this played out in these shows. In 'Judging Amy' and 'Providence,' it's having to come back home but within this context of being the child. In 'Once and Again' they're dating
again.
"We're seeing essentially the pathology and neuroses of a generation played out in drama. And isn't that what art is all about?"
Copyright © 1999 Baltimore Sun. All rights reserved.
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