Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Last night NBC aired what is, in all likelihood, the last episode of Ed, which had been one of my favorite shows. I'll miss it, but I also think that like a lot of "bubble" shows that survives to a third season, Ed lost its way a bit. Oh, it wasn't as bad as the third season of Millennium; nor did it come close to the depths plumbed by Star Trek's infamous third year; but it still fell off a bit in the quality of writing. My late, lamented Once and Again held in strong until the end of its third year, maintaining its high quality, but Ed suffered because it fell victim to a common mistake of shows like this: allowing the on-again, off-again romance between the leads (Ed and Carol Vescey) to become dominant to the near exclusion of everything else on the show.

When Ed debuted, it was a smart, quirky show about a New York City lawyer who returns to his small-town-Ohio roots to buy a bowling alley and run his own tiny law firm for the town's inhabitants. This allowed all manner of interesting supporting characters, some of whom were former high school classmates of Ed's while others were simply denizens of Stuckeyville. Ed's law work manifested in cases that were sometimes amusing, other times not so amusing, but always illustrative of decent values and a sense of what's really important in life, which was always the show's main theme when it was really "on". The romance between Ed and Carol was generally something of a subplot, something to give the show a larger sense of continuity behind the more prosaic weekly comings-and-goings.

But gradually Ed-and-Carol took over, to the point where multiple episodes would go by at a stretch and the only indication of Ed's status as a lawyer would be a shot of him sitting at his desk reading a brief or something. The show's courtroom aspect provided a nice contrast to the ongoing plotlines, and they were usually written with the kind of gentle humor and wit that I've come to enjoy more in recent years. For some reason I always enjoyed the courtroom stuff on Ed, despite the fact that I generally lost interest in courtroom drama a number of years ago. (I only watch maybe two or three episodes of Law and Order in any given season, I can't stand The Practice, et cetera. Personally, I blame David E. Kelley for ruining courtroom dramas for me. But I digress....)

The first two seasons of Ed always conveyed a sense that Ed was just a guy living in the town of Stuckeyville, and that the show was really about this small town. (In fact, the show's original title was intended to be Stuckeyville.) But the focus shifted, becoming more and more focused on Ed and Carol than on the town and its wonderful citizens.

And then, in the course of executing that romance, the show gave us not one but two love triangles complicating the whole thing, and while both were begun well, neither was resolved well. First Carol became involved with the new principal at the school where she teaches, Dennis Martino. Dennis was a very prickly soul -- he could be very caustic, initially he went out of his way to annoy Carol, and he later turned out to be a recovering alcoholic. Despite this, the writers skillfully gave Dennis an underside of warmth, so it was clear that Dennis, while prickly, was still a sympathetic man who was trying to make his life better and get back to where he had once been before. Dennis showed a lot of warmth, and by creating a love triangle with three sympathetic people, the writers of Ed created a situation that could only end in one of these characters that I loved suffering a broken heart. Nevertheless, I was confident that the writers could handle it in the appropriately bittersweet fashion.

Unfortunately, they blew it. The Ed-Carol-Dennis triangle straddled the second and third seasons, and when the third season commenced, Dennis's warmth had been surgically removed, and all that was left was the "prickly" stuff. Where he had been a good man who had suffered some blows in his life, he was now simply a harsh man, and occasionally he bordered on emotionally abusive. Thus when he was shown the door, we were meant to be glad that he was gone -- but I remembered the good Dennis from the year before, and it was all highly unsatisfying.

So, then, Ed and Carol go about their lives for a while, until Ed takes on an assistant at his law practice -- a lovely and intelligent woman named Frankie. Frankie was all warmth, a wonderful character -- who was promptly injected into the Ed-and-Carol dynamic, thus creating the second triangle. And once again, we know that either Carol or Frankie was going to end up heartbroken. To shorten the telling of a long tale, it ended up being Frankie as Ed ultimately decided that Carol was the love of his life. This was all handled very quickly, with nothing at all of Frankie's reaction depicted, and the show had previously established that in the event of Ed dumping her she would simply fly off to Houston to attempt a reconciliation with the guy she had dumped earlier in the season. I guess I was supposed to be happy that Ed and Carol were together at last, but the entire thing felt incredibly rushed in the end, and I was irritated that an excellent character like Frankie was introduced only to be tossed aside once the drama-stuff was over.

If Ed is truly done, then I'll miss it. I don't want to convey that the third season was a waste, because it wasn't -- there was a lot of good stuff there. But Ed-and-Carol should never have been allowed to take over the show as it did, because it was never one of the show's prime strengths. Had Ed-and-Carol been the show's focus at the outset, I doubt I would have bothered following the show much at all. I think that the writers, to a certain degree, lost the sense of the show's actual strengths.