Once and Again: Complete First Season (1999)
Film:
DVD:

Created by Marshall Herskovitz & Edward Zwick
Starring Sela Ward, Billy Campbell, Shane West, Julia Whelan, Evan Rachel Wood

Features:

• Twenty-two episodes
  

Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Rent it.

Meet two families that are in various stages of being broken. Lily (Ward) is separated from her husband, Jake (Jeffrey Nordling), and has two children (Whelan and Meredith Deane). Rick (Campbell) is divorced from Karen (Susanna Thompson), and has two kids (West and Wood) of his own. Because their oldest kids both attend the same school, they bump into one another, seem to hit it off, and try to make it as a couple--despite all of the baggage that they each bring to the table. How do you take care of your already gun shy family and at the same time make an attempt to love someone new?

Although I was not familiar with this series when it first aired, I see that it's touted as being from the creators of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. Although the former series I'm not familiar with, I can quickly see the similarities between Once and MSCL. Namely, both series deal with a Situation that can be drawn upon for characters and drama. The earlier series gave you High School Angst; this one deals with Life After Divorce. Both series have tremendously strong characters who talk and act like real people--and because of this, it's very easy to get wrapped up in what's going on in the series. You care for these characters and want everything to eventually be okay.

There is one flaw--and I fear it's a big one simply because it's so small. Just like MSCL, they turn the drama knob up to eleven about once an episode. The reason why this is such a huge kick in the teeth is because the writers are so good at drawing you into their world, when all of a sudden something terribly unrealistic and downright schmaltzy happens, the viewer finds himself violently kicked out of the show. It's so disconcerting that the show, despite being 97% great, is unwatchable: merely because that 3% is so egregiously bad that it's painful.

The cast are all exceptional--and as stated above, completely believable. Ward and Campbell are given the unenviable task of having to act like high schoolers again because they're back in dating mode, but they manage to convince you that yes, that's exactly how people act. They've nailed their parts, in other words. And the decision by the creators to expand upon the inner monologue/narrations of MSCL with black and white footage of the characters breaking the fourth wall is both interesting and effective.

Another bit of sadness is that this set comes with nada in the way of extras. A featurette or a commentary of some sort would be nice, to talk about the process by which the creators came up with the concept of the show to begin with, and then went about casting the parts. But here we get nothing--another reason why I'm considering this one a rental. If you're a fan of the show, you're going to want the thing on DVD bare bones or not--but the rest of us should save time and hair by renting.