Oh, those poignant coming-of-age years, when every blemish is a throbbing wart, every emotion is so potent no one could have ever felt it before and every kiss makes you question anew the entire direction of your life.
Yes, being in your 20s can be a roller coaster.
That, at least, is the growing consensus of prime-time television, where coming-of-age stories, which used to focus only on the turbulent inner lives and messy outer deeds of teenagers, are starting to acknowledge a delayed maturation process.
More and more, the characters who are earnestly and painfully trying to find their places in the world tend to be out of college and stumbling about in a big city somewhere, wondering if they’ll ever get lasting love and nourishing work–though not a cheap apartment, which never seems to be a problem for TV characters.
The latest evidence of this comes with two of the most eagerly anticipated midseason replacement series, “Significant Others,” from “Party of Five” creators Amy Lippman and Christopher Keyser, and “Two Guys, A Girl and A Pizza Place,” from “Mad About You” Executive Producer Danny Jacobson.
Both debut tonight. “Significant Others” (8 p.m., WFLD-Ch. 32) explicitly treats the topic, with its trio of two male and one female leads, age 25 or so, spending much of the first two episodes bemoaning their confusion about why they haven’t yet found a place to fit in.
“What happened to do overs?” asks one of the main characters in the speech that serves as the series’ thesis statement. “Pick the wrong girl? Dump her. Move to the right girl. I loved that. I loved how everything seemed to matter but nothing really did . . . I think stuff is starting to count now. We may not notice it but one day, wham, we are who we’re gonna be.”
The trio of leads in “Two Guys . . .” (8:30 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7) places only the “girl” in the real world yet; the guys are both graduate students. And it’s a sitcom, so its primary goal is to make funny jokes rather than statements about life, which it does with a touch too much desperation. But that series, too, comes from the premise that what these people are doing now–working at a pizza place and studying–may not yet matter but will soon.
These join a growing cast of series in recent years–“Relativity,” “Ally McBeal” and “Friends” and its imitators among them–that have acknowledged the societal reality. College and, especially, high school are no longer funneling people directly into their life molds.
How many modern twentysomethings have had the stunning realization that, as they dabble in potential careers and mates, their own parents, at the same age, already had them in nursery school?
Responsible adult activities such as marriage, childbirth and subscribing to daily newspapers all come later, leaving the 20s as the transition time, a period where you may hang on to cartoons and favorite candies but are also starting to feel the 401(k) urge.
In addition to its clunky name, “Two Guys Etc.” plays too sitcommy, slamming home its characters’ quirks and the stream of punch lines with a frenzy that belies Jacobson’s confident hand in guiding “Mad About You.”
Berg (Ryan Reynolds), for instance, the feckless roommate, supplements his income by testing experimental drugs, and fully half the jokes seem to stem from this forced situation. Pete (Richard Ruccolo) is more analytical so the joke on him becomes his fear of deviating from his life plan. Upstairs neighbor Sharon (a too-brassy Traylor Howard) hates everything about her job selling chemicals except the money. Result? Lots of jokes about environmental damage.
Much better at what it is trying to accomplish is “Significant Others,” which fits, in a smarter way, the pattern Fox established with “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place.” “90210,” focusing on high school kids at the start, was becoming established, when “Melrose Place,” another Aaron Spelling show, this one looking at young, single adults, was added two years later.
Similarly, “Party of Five” is about a parentless San Francisco family, ranging in age from childhood to young 20s. Bowing in 1994, it took time and a lot of patience from Fox to be established as a popular success, but critics liked it from the start and Keyser and Lippman won awards for their writing which had the family tackling the most unbelievable array of crises ever to strike one group.
Now Fox has turned to the executive producers for “Significant Others.” Much as Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the producers behind “thirtysomething” (30s) and “My So-Called Life” (teens) did with last year’s “Relativity” (20s), Keyser and Lippman have made it about finding yourself in that post-collegiate decade.
The principal trio are longtime best friends Campbell (Eion Bailey), reluctant heir to a family lingerie business, Nell (Jennifer Garner), a perpetual job quitter, and Henry (Scott Bairstow), an aspiring fiction writer churning out on-line pornography.
On the fringes are Campbell’s parents, his brother, and his brother’s new wife, whom Campbell used to date.
Keyser and Lippman have not lost their knack for casting. As in “Party of Five,” which has several of its actors (most prominently Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love Hewitt) on the brink of being able to move full time into movies, these are not just attractive people but ones who can keep constant talk about their emotions from seeming overly whiney.
This is important because, in the same way that “Party of Five” hammers home its twin, sometimes conflicting themes of what-about-me and family-first, “Significant Others” goes very hard after the becoming-an-adult theme.
We’ll set aside the relative cheapness of putting two of the principal characters in the sex business, because there is not, at least in the early going, a parade of scantily-clad models or gratuitous sex references.
It’s mostly intelligent, mostly affecting soul searching, and there is enough subtle humor to keep it from crossing the border into too earnest. There certainly is a lot going on for the writers to work with.
Nell and Henry are having an affair with each other they’ve kept secret from Campbell, but they aren’t sure whether it works because of the secret or because it’s love. Henry wants to write, but can’t find inspiration. Campbell wants his own business venture rather than take over the one his dad started. Nell wants a job she’s not tired of in two days.
“You can’t commit to a pet or a lease or a channel on TV,” Campbell tells her.
And she tells a prospective boss, who’s concerned about her spotty resume, “this is gonna be the point in my life I can look back on and say, `This is when I made the decision to grow up.’ . . . Please give me the chance to grow up.”
The job she pleads so earnestly for, of course, turns out to be a copying and collating nightmare, and she is soon debating whether to make her resume look even worse.
The working theory behind all this is that the angst of twentysomethings is more meaningful than that of teenagers because the decisions matter more.
The trade off is that extra ache of seeing someone experience something for the first time versus the resonance of seeing someone who has made mistakes and maybe even learned from them.
Sex and beer and goatees may not be as surprising or as poignant in a young adult as they are in a teenager, but in the hands of Keyser and Lippman, “Significant Others” effectively draws you into the question of what do you do when you’re getting too old to work at Starbucks.
