Cathy's World: Everwood

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 18 (UPI) -- A TV writer friend of mind remembers sitting at the industry lunch spot Pinot Hollywood one afternoon a few years ago, watching "7th Heaven" creator and writer Brenda Hampton drink iced tea and check her watch as the minutes ticked past.

Thankfully, she wasn't stood up. Then-WB chief Jamie Kellner eventually arrived, around 1:20 or so. But Hampton's -- and Kellner's -- place in the industry totem pole was made crystal clear.

A year or so later, "7th Heaven" was the WB's highest rated show, which it still is, despite its corny writing and resolute squareness. And my friend, who lunches at Pinot Hollywood regularly, noticed that one day an entirely cadre of WB execs arrived at a table, right on time, at 1 p.m.

They didn't order right away, though, because they were waiting for someone: Brenda Hampton, who walked in a few minutes later, greeted by effusive smiles all around.

So when I read that "Everwood" creator and writer Greg Berlanti calls his new WB show "the anti-7th Heaven," I had to laugh.

"Everwood" is a hit -- one of the few real ones, in fact, to break out of the pack of new shows that premiered this fall season. But it should be so lucky to be a hit on the level of "7th Heaven." And although it's much better written, it's also just as moistly sentimental and then some.

"Everwood" is about brilliant New York neurosurgeon Dr. Brown (Treat Williams), who moves his sullen teenaged son Ephram (Gregory Smith) and spunky grade school daughter Delia (Vivien Cardone) to an idyllic Colorado town after his wife dies in a car accident.

I think of the show as "7th Heaven" squared. In fact, you could call it "49th-Parallel Heaven," even though only the pilot was shot in Canada. (Utah now stands in for Colorado.) Characters include boyfriend-in-a-coma Colin (Mike Erwin) -- the incapacitated love, naturally, of lovely Amy (Emily VanCamp), who Ephram's been mooning after since his first day of high school.

Then there's the town's interracial older couple, kindly school bus driver Irv (John Beasley), the second husband of former Viet Nam nurse Edna (Debra Mooney), who volunteered for a job as Dr. Brown's office nurse because she can't stand being around fussbudgety Dr. Abbott (Tom Amandes), the town's only other doctor and, as it happens, her son.

Dr. Abbott, whose role is rather similar to the Dr. Smith character in "Lost In Space," is my favorite Everwood citizen. But more about that in a minute.

Irv, who's the only black person in this tiny Colorado town, hardly gets any screen time but narrates "Everwood" in a nostalgic "Our Town" manner. Why Irv? Well, because he's black, I suppose, and therefore uniquely positioned - according to conventional Hollywood wisdom - to comment folksily on the sentimental adventures of white people.

In a flashback scene about Colin and Amy before Colin car-crashed himself into a coma, for instance, Irv's voiceover comments, "Our Town"-ishly, on "the perfect day," as Colin and Amy and Amy's brother lounge in teenaged bliss in bathing suits by the lake.

"Come on, you guys, we don't have all day," Amy says.

"Sure we do," says Colin, flashing his underarm hair to the camera.

The heart of "Everwood," however, is angry teenaged Ephram's tense relationship with his dad, Dr. Brown.

Creator and head writer Greg Berlanti, who at 30 is already a TV veteran - he took over showrunner duties on the WB teen drama "Dawson's Creek" a couple of years ago - said he didn't want to focus only on teens this time around.

"I really wanted to have characters that were cross-generational, where everyone was sort of a large, dysfunctional family that extended amongst the whole community," he noted at the WB press conference.

Sometimes Dr. Brown and Ephram have rapprochements, like when Ephram prepared cream cheese for one his father's pre-surgery breakfasts, or helped dad deliver a baby in a donut shop.

And Dr. Brown was pretty understanding that time Ephram blubbed ridiculously when a stray deer they'd tried to return to her original forest home couldn't be returned exactly there, because that particular patch was burnt from a forest fire and so the deer had to be relocated - oh, I don't know - at least several yards further on.

After the blubbing, though - and Ephram always looks like he's just been blubbing, even when he hasn't been - there was of course hugging and learning.

None of which is to say I don't like the strangely addictive "Everwood." I do. In fact, I never miss it. Please don't hate me.

Still, there's something about this show that makes you want to throw things at the screen.

Who, I periodically muse to myself, is the most irritating "Everwood" citizen? Let's see, there's...

Dr. Brown. Because he insists on not charging anyone in "Everwood" for any medical services, even when they insist they have insurance. And because he has a habit of curling up in front of a video with darling daughter Delia with the cheery announcement, "We're having snacks!"

Delia's horrible friend Magilla (Bret Loehr), a school bully who we're supposed to find sympathetic because he keeps a trunk full of Barbie dolls in the closet.

Dr. Brown's saintly understanding neighbor Nina (Stephanie Niznik), because she refers to children as "munchkins," and because she agreed to be a surrogate mother for a 55-year-old woman, which shocks the townspeople, until Dr. Brown gives them all a sniffy lecture about the right of every woman to be a mother.

"I don't envy that kid," says Ephram, who doesn't buy it, pointing out that the adoptive mother could very well get sick or die before the baby grows up.

"But she could live to be 100. He could be luckier than you," says Dr. Brown. Uh-huh. Well, he COULD be. But...ever hear of actuarial charts, Dr. Brown?

Gregory Smith is such a good little actor that Ephram is actually far less annoying than he could be, despite all the blubbing.

Colin and his underarm hair have potential, but he hasn't quite come out of that coma yet, so we'll have to wait and see.

Meanhile, Dr. Abbott is by far the LEAST irritating Everwoodian because he is himself so easily irritated. As Tom Amandes plays him, Dr. Abbott is a welcome wedge of lemon in a show that would otherwise be too unbearably sweet.

The other week Dr. Brown was hellbent on educated the local teens on sexually transmitted diseases. "News flash, Dr. Brown," Dr. Abbott pointed out. "You're not here to save the world. Just to annoy it."