Any "Everwood" fans here?
It aired on the WB from 2002-2006, and was cancelled when the CW merge happened.
The show was too good for the WB. Far heavier and emotionally deeper than anything else on that network.
For those that don't know - the initial premise of the show was that Treat Williams' character, Dr. Andrew Brown, was a world-renowned brain surgeon in New York City, married, with two children, but a strained relationship with both his wife and teenage son(played by Gregory Smith) due to his being at the hospital all the time and too often missing out on 'family' things because of his work. In the pilot, his wife dies in traffic accident on a rainy night. His wife in the past had made him promise that if anything ever happened to her, to take the kids to Everwood, Colorado, because she'd once been their for a short period of time and it was the most beautiful place she'd ever seen. So he does just that. Quits his job(he's got plenty of money saved up after being a brain surgeon for over a decade), takes his children, and moves to Colorado, where he opens up a local clinic and gives the local doctor, Harold Abbot, unwanted competition. Andrew and Ephram's coping with losing their wife and mother, Ephram's strained relationship with his father, Ephram's on-off relationship with Harold's daughter Amy(played by Emily Vancamp), Andrew's eventual 'falling in love again' with next-door neighbor Nina, and Andrew and Harold's growing professional relationship and friendship are at the heart of the show. The writing and acting are both quite, quite good.
The thing that made this show great was that its relationships were intense.
There were yelling matches between father and son in all four seasons, but they all served a purpose, and although they went from having a bad relationship to having a better one to having a bad one again to having a good one again, etc, every twist and turn served to mature both of them as characters, and by the end, their relationship was the best it had ever been.
The Ephram-Amy relationship from day one was written as the real thing, and not just high-school puppy love. They were both WAY emotionally mature for their age(largely due to the fact that at the time they met they were both going through things that forced them to grow up) and as a result they were usually the only ones who really 'got' each other. They were on and off for four years while they discovered themselves more and more and figured out what they wanted in life and what was important in life and dealing with their individual personal problems, but every twist and turn in their relationship was intense as can be, and in the end, each one served to only deepen their relationship.
The show dealt with coping with the death of loved ones, going on with life, trust, betrayal, forgiveness, growing up, the intricacies of parental, sibling, and romantic relationships, the cultivation of real friendships with people you never thought you could be friends with, characters learning about themselves, getting over first impressions, and much more.
I was very upset when it didn't make the CW's schedule for the 2006-07 season, especially since it had initially made it but had been cut to make room to revive 7th Heaven for one more year. But in some ways, I'm glad it only lasted for four years...it didn't have a chance to get worse with years the way a lot of shows do. Knowing that they had to finish by the end of the fourth season forced them to give certain storylines a satisfying yet unrushed closure before they got stretched out too much, which may well happened if the show had kept going.
This is my second favorite show of the decade.
ray:
