How Accurate Is Once and Again?
Remarkably, as it turns out. Culturebox isn't a divorced mom in the suburbs,
but she did conduct an informal survey of divorced suburban parents she knows
on the realism of Once and Again . That's the much-touted new drama by
writers/producers/directors Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (who is divorced)
about two divorced parents in the suburbs who meet cute--while dropping their
kids off at school--and date even cuter. (It airs tonight on ABC, at 10
p.m.)
Here are two picayune but quite common details of the separated life that
Culturebox, for one, has never seen on a TV series before. (If you have, please
write Culturebox and tell her where.)
The endless shlepping. Children in joint-custody arrangements invariably
forget stuff at one parent's house and make the other one take them there late
at night or first thing in the morning. At the beginning of the episode, Eli
Sammler, 11th -grade son of the male half of the new couple, Rick
Sammler, announces he has to be taken to his mother's because he's left his
history notes there.
The homework-falling-through-holes syndrome. It's completely understandable
that parents who don't communicate well would have a hard time keeping track of
schoolwork done by one child at two households during the course of a single
week. This comes up in Once and Again when Eli starts failing two
subjects at school because Rick doesn't make the teen-ager buckle down on the
nights he sleeps at Rick's house.
Many of the other details of divorce on Once and Again are the
regular fare of family sitcoms or dramas. There's the slightly tired riff about
deadbeat dads: Lily's ex-husband promises to show up at their daughter's soccer
game, but forgets about it until Lily angrily reminds him. There are the mutual
accusations of denial or neurosis, with each parent accusing the other either
of refusing to face their children's problems or of making too much of them.
There's the way the smart-aleck children discuss the details of their parents'
sex lives with them.
That last, in fact, strikes the falsest note in Once and Again , since
it has been Culturebox's experience that real children will go to some lengths
to avoid the disgusting details of a parent's sex life. Zwick and Herskovitz
grasp this, in principle, since at one point they have Lily's daughter asking
plaintively, "Why can't they keep their private lives private ?" But the
needs of dramatic exposition clearly proved too much for the show's creators:
How else are you going to get Lily and Rick to go into their feelings for each
other, or at least about dating, if they aren't going to share with their kids?
After all, who else do divorced parents spend their time with? (Lily gossips
some with her sister, an annoyingly perky single creature, but goes on and on
about her fears of dating with her daughters; Rick mostly keeps things to
himself, but is interrogated by curious children.) Despite lapses like these,
Once and Again strikes Culturebox as the first show to make an attempt
to capture divorce as it is lived today. With a 50 percent divorce rate in
America and 3 out of 10 households run by a single parent (three times as many
as two decades ago), Once and Again seems poised to become for joint
custody what Thirtysomething was for yuppie angst.
