Everwood Season 2
Everwood makes the smart move in its sophomore season: it shakes everything up. I could easily have imagined another season in which Ephram pined for Amy and had fights with his dad…and I would probably have loved that season!
Instead, everything is upside down. Last season Ephram had purple hair and emo outbursts, this season Amy has depression bangs and actual depression. Last season Amy and her father were close, this season their relationship completely fractures and she moves out for the entire middle of the season. Last season Ephram and Dr. Brown were fighting and repressing their emotions, now they communicate and express their emotions. Everything is different, and it’s great.
I especially loved Amy’s story. It was wonderful to see the show take the aftermath of Colin’s death seriously. I thought her depression storyline was sensitive and well done. The dream sequences are great, her malaise and desperation and her family’s frustration and helplessness all feel achingly real. The anti-depressant storyline broke my heart: her clear need for the medication and her father’s wrongheaded inability to give them to her. Watching her move out and watching her father learn that he sometimes had to step back, give her some space, let his wife Rose take the lead (Rose really comes into her own this season) was amazing. I also loved Amy’s relationship with Tommy. It follows up on Amy’s tendency to invest WAY too much in her boyfriends, but this time with a guy who is truly troubled and dangerous and with an added element of sunk cost fallacy, plus a class divide…it was meaty stuff!
All the other storylines are great too! Last season I noticed that the show tackles a lot of LGBTQ adjacent issues like surrogacy, medical privacy, and hating your dad through the lens of this small-town WB show full of straight people. This season doubles down on that approach, with great results. It introduces an HIV positive character, and fully explores the complexities of living with HIV: dating, working, and being a part of a community. There’s also Ephram’s romance with Madison, the baby-sitter who’s four years older than him. The show ventures into very dangerous waters here, but I thought it threaded the needle, portraying the relationship as both a dangerous bad idea and a formative and mostly non-destructive experience for everyone. Age gap romance is more common in the LGBTQ community, I suppose due to its culture and just a more limited dating pool. That can lead to horrible abuse, but I expect that the more ambiguous experience portrayed here is also common.
All that, plus we get the great episode with the mine accident, which is structurally inventive and tells you so much about the community. The wedding episode immediately became one of my all time favorite wedding episodes (all the best tv weddings feature side characters, that way the leads can be sad and interesting). Delia continues to be an all-time great tv kid. She gets some real character development, and the scene when she says goodbye to Madison is one of the best in the whole season. I liked that they let Irv push back against Edna a bit, now he isn’t just the wise old Black man. And the guest stars! Marcia Cross is great in a role that is worlds apart from Bree Van de Camp. Phillip Baker Hall returns, and Betty White and James Earl Jones are added to the rotation. I love what they did with Bright this season. It would have been so easy to send him off to college. But they did something that teen tv shows and books and movies never do: explore what happens when you don’t get in anywhere. They resisted the temptation to give him a love interest right away, and instead told a story about a guy finding his self-worth and growing up. It was so good!!! All that, and I got to see Dr. Abbott in a big giant chef’s hat.
The season finale promises a whole new status quo next season. Dr. Brown was doing pretty well all season, but now he’s in crisis, and he’s just made the very questionable decision to keep Madison’s pregnancy a secret from Ephram. Ephram and Amy are in a romantic bubble, that may burst at any moment once the Madison secret comes out. Dr. Abbott and Dr. Brown (and Edna!) will be sharing office space. And Bright will be doing who knows what. I’m so excited to watch it all.
