I am – Hercules!!
Dark, shameful secret time. “Everwood” has somehow evolved from a show I tolerated to, at least for the moment, one of my favorite ongoing series.
Not sure when it happened. Could have been at the start of the current, third season, with the arrival of Hannah, the sad, bespectacled, lovelorn girl with the sick dad back home. Could have begun with the crop of installments that began with Ephram’s visit to New York.
But suddenly we’re not seeing as much of Andy Brown’s cranky old comic-relief nurse. Suddenly Harold Abbott is more than the envious dumbshit across the street. The show has gone, rather improbably, from hackery to something approaching genius. “Everwood” moves and involves me now. I must have laughed aloud six or seven times at the last episode alone. (I don’t believe I laughed twice during the show’s first two seasons!)
Was a new showrunner put in place this year? Were the show’s old, bad writers so preoccupied with the horrible “Jack & Bobby” this season? (Yes, I’m looking at you, Greg “Dawson’s Creek” Berlanti.) If so, the WB needs to keep the new showrunner aboard and happy at all costs. And if the WB doesn’t, one of the other networks needs to give this showrunner a series all his or her own.
Tonight brings “Everwood’s” finale, and I actually find myself wondering what I want to see first - it, or the final hour of the “24” finale.
What a turnaround!!
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The Monday finale that presents no scheduling issues for me is “Medium.” The biggest thing I don’t like about Glen Gordon Caron’s compelling and generally agreeable smash is its lack of episode-to-episode continuity. Hopefully NBC, inspired by the “Law & Order” franchise’s declining numbers, will allow the show to start building longer and more complex stories when it returns next season.
Tonight’s season finale employs at least a bit of continuity, as psychic mom Allison DuBois is once again called upon by Capt. Kenneth Push (Arliss Howard), the Texas Ranger who learned in the pilot episode that Allison has powers and abilities not often found among mortal men.
“Everwood”: 9 p.m. Monday. The WB.
“Medium”: 10 p.m. Monday. NBC.
