NOW AND AGAIN:

By: Frederick C. Szebin
Date: Tuesday, October 26, 1999

Executive Producer Glenn Gordon Caron has a history of injecting more into his shows than most producers are capable of. His MOONLIGHTING of the 1980s, when it was good, was exceptional. Even when it wasn't so hot, it still had a style unlike anything else out there. This time he offers us NOW AND AGAIN, a super-hero show with heart and a head...in more ways than one.

The whole thing began with the last day in the normal life of insurance man Michael Wiseman (John Goodman). The poor guy woke up, was rebuffed from an early morning erotic interlude by his lovely wife (Colin), sensed a distancing between himself and his teen age daughter (Matarazzo), and loses an important promotion at the office because of the short-sightedness of his youth-oriented bosses. It's then that he gets drunk with his pal Roger from work (Graham) and gets bumped at the subway platform into an oncoming train (quite a nice special effect as he is swept away with it).

But his day is hardly over. Super secret government doctor Theodore Morris (Haysbert) gives Wiseman's brain a pep talk about how he is going to be unlike anyone else on the planet. And six months later, he is. He is suddenly in the body of a genetically altered 26 year old (Close) with the strength of Superman, the physical abilities of an army of normal men, but his own mind and conscience guiding him down the dark alleys of government espionage. Meanwhile, his widow and daughter are working hard to keep a roof above their heads when the very insurance company Wiseman worked for as John Goodman refuses to pay on his claim. Part of Wiseman/Close's deal with Morris is that he never get in touch with his family, friends or any other part of his old life as they train him to be the government's latest secret weapon.


Well, where would a show like this be if our hero kept a promise like that? He makes it to the end of the first episode when he gives her a ring on Morris's cell phone. Redial is a bitch, Wiseman finds out, and NOW AND AGAIN is on the way to being one of the most iconoclastic and intelligent shows in too many a moon.

This is part drama, part science fiction, part super-hero adventure program, part romancea real smidgen of everything kind of show. But long-time SF fans will immediately recognize a big chunk of David Ely's SECONDS, filmed beautifully in 1966 by John Frankenheimer, with Rock Hudson as a man who goes to a super-secret company to be remade young, to be given a second chance at life, and not realizing until it is too late how much of that old life continues to affect him. That happens here to an extent, with Wiseman's memories coming back so strong that he just has to see his wife and child again and remain some kind of satellite in their lives, much to the chagrin of deadly old Theo Morris.

The first episode opened chillingly as the Egg Man, an elderly Japanese, leaves his deadly packageregular old eggson a Tokyo subway train. Once they break, they release a toxin that causes everyone on the train to bleed from nose, eyes and mouth. But Wiseman's first real challenge is to get used to what he now is, and this is illustrated beautifully when Goodman wakes up in a hospital room, trudges his aching body to the sink, bends over to splash cold water on his face. When he straightens and looks at himself in the secret two-way mirror, he is Eric Close, young, virile, handsome. Morris sings the Carpenters' 'Close To You' on the other side of the mirror as Close/Wiseman investigates his new body, with emphasis on the lyric where the angels are creating the perfect man. By the end of his first week, the new Wiseman is despondent, wanting to die, but he surreptitiously contacts his 'widow' as she deals with the almost insurmountable problems of bringing up a teenage daughter while fighting with the insurance company, trying to make something of her life and keep the house she shared with Goodman/Wiseman.

The show could easily have gone into FX and pyrotechnics from there, to show off what a wonderful creation Wiseman has become, but this is a far too gentle and intelligent program for that. Sure, we get to see some daring-do by episode two, and episode three has him fighting his superior yet again when they want him to execute a former agent selling secrets to our enemies, but the real interest in this show is his internal dismay over what he is supposed to do. 'I just don't know if I can do this,' he tells Murphy, a fellow agent sent to help him on the assassination job. Murphy replies, 'If you knew you could do it, I'd be worried.'

Wiseman's wife repeatedly shows up in his dreams, acting as an outlet for the building guilt of what he has become a party of in discussions that are both amusing and telling. In one remarkable dream from the third episode, 'One For the Money', his wife shows up looking great in a flowing red dress, enticing him to their bedroom. She lays at the center of the bed and flips up both sides of the blankets to reveal automatic weapons of various kinds; then he's accosted by his Khaki-clad daughter, gleefully thanking him for bringing the dead body he had killed to Career Day.

The super-hero angle will most likely be played up in future episodes, but these initial adventures set a detailed groundwork for what promises to be one of the best character pieces SF television has ever had. NOW AND AGAIN has the methodical pace of most character-driven tales, and for that it is a milestone compared to much of television today, which is tuned to the attention span of a music video junkie, taking little if any time to let us know the characters we're supposed to follow for the next several years. Given the chance, the terrific characters portrayed by an endearing cast could make everything we have enjoyed before seem so muddle-headed and simplistic. Let their story be told, and we'll be rewarded with not only an excellent super-hero show (gad! that is a gross oversimplification!), but one of the better SF-adventure-comedy-drama-romance-kitchen sink programs we could have ever dreamed of.

CBS, Friday 9:00 PM. Executive Producer & Creator, Glenn Gordon Caron. Starring: Margaret Colin, Dennis Haysbert, Heather Matarazzo, Eric Close, Gerrit Graham.

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