Sometimes the anger never goes away.

I had a coupon for Media Play whose expiration date is tomorrow, so I zipped over there after work and picked up the first season of the luminous show Once and Again, of which I was a huge fan when it was still on the air and whose cancellation after three ratings-challenged seasons I mourned greatly.

And now, after watching about nine minutes of the pilot (just for a bit; I'll watch the whole thing later on after The Daughter goes to bed), I note a couple of interesting emotional states:

1. I've just fallen in love with Sela Ward again.

2. I've just remembered how good the Zwick/Herskovitz team is at doing love-story stuff, which bodes well for the film version of The Lions of Al-Rassan.

3. It's been over three years since Once and Again went off the air, but I'm all pissed off at ABC again. Damn them!

What I'm looking forward to is seeing the first two-thirds of the first season, for the first time. I didn't start following the show until about the sixteenth episode or so, for reasons relating, if memory serves, to an awful timeslot on a night when I was almost always working (I was still in the restaurant biz). I wanted to watch this show from the start, knowing as I did that it was from the creators of My So-Called Life, another brilliant show that ABC killed in a brilliant move (detect a theme here, folks?).

I want to watch Lily and Rick meet, and fall in love; I want to watch their families slowly start to come together (a process which was still going on when the show's third, and final, season ended). For some reason, I'm craving stories lately that remind me that the newness of love need not be a lost feeling as one arrives on the cusp of middle age. Once and Again is about that very theme.

(Funny thing: I opened up the first DVD and found, tucked with the booklet, an ad for ABC's new fall medical drama, MDs, and its new sitcom, Life with Bonnie. Both of those shows debuted in fall of 2002. Both tanked.)