So if you turn on Everwood (which I don’t even watch when it’s on (9pm Thursdays on The WB) because it competes with 24) - if you just turn it on and watch a few beats, you will get the impression that it’s kind of heavy-handed - some of the characters have their own musical introduction music, as when Dr. Abbott shows up; he’s given this toot-tootle-oot woodwind, meant to underscore his dandyishness, at which point maybe you pull off your shoe and throw it at the television. I understand. But Everwood is worth it because of these discrete moments the whole show is constructed around, usually one per episode, that make the endeavor worthwhile. And it’s the characters who are heavy, not the writers. In their moments of crisis, the characters let their assuredness slip, and that’s when the show lights up. In yesterday’s episode, Dr. Abbott denies to his daughter Amy, an eighteen-year-old college freshman, that he’s ever performed an abortion, when she knows he has. When she next confronts him about it, he says

You have to understand, this was a promise that I made to my father [also the town doctor] as I stepped into a role that he created back when the options available to women were much more limited than they are today. So I did what I had to, in his name, all right? In his name only.

The characters are pushed to their limits, bend a little, and then elastically return to their equilibrium, which is very much what series television is all about. The intentional scarcity of the truly dramatic moments coupled with fine, consistant acting are what make it really good. In another of the stories from yesterday, Ephram, the main teenage character, a piano prodigy who has partway renounced his talent, is caretaking one of his music students, a talented boy in shambles. Ephram is researching potential Juliard scholarships; Ephram is watching, from a respectful remove, a potential reunion with the boy’s absent father, who doesn’t show. Ephram’s father tells him he should be concentrating on his own work, his own life, instead trying to solve someone else’s problems. He thinks, as we think, that Ephram is trying to fix the mistakes of his past through this boy - not blow his chance at Juliard, not let anger overwhelm professional ambition. But Ephram leans back in his chair and says that his son (he got a girl pregnant when he was seventeen, a fact which she concealed from him) will feel the same abandonment and anger towards him that his student has for his father; he is putting himself in the position of the boy’s father, not the boy himself. It’s an deft narrative move, a needle impeccably threaded. It’s all I think about, he says.

Everwood is going to get canceled. The WB is merging with UPN to create The CW, and Everwood does not have an explicit place on any future schedule, meaning, if I know how TV executives think, it’s over. Which is fine; it gave the writers of these episodes a sense of accelerated urgency, which shows in the final product.