While waiting for the typically excellent
Buffy to start last night, I caught the tail-end of the really banal
Once And Again, the new series from the makers of
Thirtysomething but designed for fortysomethings. The last five minutes contained this intense heart-to-heart between the main character and his daughter, with the two of them explaining their feelings using simple but poetic metaphors. Meanwhile this was being spliced with black-and-white interludes of the daughter talking about learning to ride her bike (yes, another metaphor).
It makes me think that all the complaints about Dawson's Creek's verbosity are misguided. Nearly every American show (hell, even Full House) has these scenes where the characters, usually the adults but sometimes kids as well, will suddenly know exactly what to say to make things right, or will have the perfect analogy for the situation and suddenly everything will become clear. Which is not real in the slightest. When was the last time you came up with a simple analogy for your life that worked smoothly, that even you understood, let alone someone else? Dawson's Creek may draw upon a wider vocabulary than most shows, not to mention real life, but the fact that the characters still confuse eachother, still have to struggle to make sense, seems to be much more realistic to me. Not that I particularly like Dawson's Creek anymore, but if it's a choice between that and Once And Again... Well, it's not even a choice.
