Now and Again

I loved this show when it first aired on CBS. I was upset when it was canceled after only one season. When NBC came out with the new show Reveris this spring staring Denis Haisbert, it reminded me how much I liked him on Now and Again so I desided to see if I could stream it from someone. I found it on YouTube. It's free, no adds. Check it out.

I can see why it was cancelled, I mean, it's intelligent, funny and has great characters and dialogue. How dare it!

This is a great show that positively demanded a second series but was dropped like a hot cake on a hot day on top of an erupting volcano. I freely admit it could have done with a little more action (which we would've got in the second series) but this is a minor quibble when this show is in the same league as 24 (also starring Haysbert) and The West Wing.

More please!

I first caught this show early Sunday morning on the Sci Fi channel. The quality of the episode and the early morning air time told me that the series had already been canceled. I have still never seen the pilot with John Goodman, but I have seen most of the episodes.

It is a marvelous show. Eric Close is brilliant as Mr. Wiseman, the human guinea pig of a government experiment in creating a super soldier/agent. His humor in dealing with the dour Dr. Morris and his almost palpable yearning for his wife and daughter left me with an aching pain for a man caught in a surreal nightmare. What makes it even more poignant is Wiseman's refusal to allow himself to be just a guinea pig. He adamantly asserts his humanity and forces Dr. Morris to accept it also.

Dennis Haysbert is Dr. Theodore Morris, the brilliant but tightly wound Frankenstein creator of a most uncooperative monster. One of the great aspects of this show is the fact that Dr. Morris is not a villain. He is a complex man who needs the humanity his creation forces from him. Wiseman refuses to let Morris be a cold and heartless mad scientist. He picks and prods and digs out all of humanity that Dr. Morris tries so hard to bury.

Margaret Colin and Heather Matarazzo are Lisa Wiseman, his grieving widow, and Heather Wiseman, his grieving and angry daughter. They are confused and frightened of this strange handsome young man who calls himself Mr. Newman. He moves in and out of their reality doing inexplicable things (such as asking Lisa to hold an egg without breaking it on a busy subway platform) and displaying an uncannily intimate knowledge of their lives and thoughts.

Now and Again was intelligent, touching and funny all at the same time and it was much too good to last.

I haven't seen a single episode of this show since it originally aired. I was a child at the time, but it's been 18 years and I still think about this show on a weekly basis. I also think about this show whenever I hear an Allstate commercial or see anything containing John Goodman. It was such a compelling story! It had heart, brains, and humor. I also remember that the pacing was usually on point. I wish I could find a single living person who remembers watching this.

Network suits! Why can't we get rid of these people. Along the same line as those wise souls that said "Oh, and Mr. Rodenberry, get rid of the guy with the ears." This show wasn't just science fiction. It was an view of love existing past death. Along the line of "Damn Yankees", it poses the question, if you got everything you wanted, would you give up everything you loved? OK Wiseman is a middle aged insurance exec. Passed over for a promotion, he gets soused and is accidentally/ on purpose? knocked into the path of a subway. Recovering consciousness, he is offered a proposition: he is legally dead, but his brain was able to be recovered intact. Now would he like to be allowed to die for good, or participate in a secret government program to inhabit an artificially created body of the perfect soldier?

I would still like to see a movie to wrap up the story like Firefly/Serenity, but that would require someone with vision, sadly lacking in Hollywood.