October Road: Pilot (series premiere)

(S01E01) I went into the series premiere of October Road with very low expectations. The reviews, by and large, ranged from "this show is so-so," to "this show blows."

But still, something made me want to watch. It was set in the greater Boston area. (I live in the Boston area.) A character wears a Boston Red Sox cap all the time. (There are many different kinds of Sox caps in my house.) The main character's a writer . . . you get the idea.

With the gift of the time slot after Grey's Anatomy -- but the curse of being up against the NCAA first round games -- October Road was given a golden opportunity that many new series aren't.

And it kind of faltered. But, if ABC gives it enough time (a precious, almost non-existent commodity in today's primetime environment), I think there's a chance that, like the freshman series Brothers & Sisters, it could, repeat, could right its ship. If it stops being so heavy-handed that is.

The premise of the show is that a twentysomething novelist, Nick Garrett (played by Bryan Greenberg) wrote one and only book that skewered his hometown buddies in the fictional Knights Ridge, Massachusetts. Originally planning to live in town and continue dating his college girlfriend Hannah, Nick was going to start a window company with his best buddy as soon as he got back from a six-week, post-college trip across Europe. But Nick never came back. Instead he traveled, went to New York City, wrote a bestseller that was turned into a movie and he became the toast of New York. But when writer's block hit, Nick's editor suggested that he go back to Knights Ridge for the first time in a decade to not only face the music with his friends who were upset at how they were portrayed in his book, but that Nick teach a one-day seminar at a local college about writing.

And then came the show's heavy-handedness to spoil all the fun. Think of a ridiculously over-sized Looney Tunes sledgehammer smashing you on the head. That's how subtle October Road was with some of its themes. For example: You can't go home again and you need to remember where you came from. Those two sayings were relentlessly repeated via some stilted, awkward dialog. To distance Nick from his working class hometown pals, the writers put into his mouth a series of bad lines that fell flat the moment they were uttered.

When Nick sees his old flame Hannah -- who he unceremoniously left 10 years ago and now has a nearly 10-year-old boy who Nick is certain is his -- kiss a guy who was a hometown creep, the creep asks Nick if he's surprised that he and Hannah are an item. "Shocked to a stupefying silence I may never recover from is probably a better way to describe it," Nick said.

After he fled the college auditorium because he was having a panic attack, a single college student stayed in the room, waiting to see if Nick would return. When he did, she asked him why he flipped out. Nick replied, "I'm not really sure why . . . I can't impart wisdom. I can't inspire."

At the end of the show, as Nick calls his editor to say that he thinks his writer's block can be solved by staying in Knights Ridge, Nick says, "I was wrong all along, 'cause there are a lot of unexpected adventures and I'm just not ready to walk away, not a second time. The way I see it, this thing's in diapers."

Ick.

And despite the fact that the show was bashed by many reviewers -- including by the two major Boston newspapers -- I think that if the writers loosen Nick up and stop making him sound like an over-earnest English lit grad student and stop forcing their after-school special messages down viewers throats, October Road could work. It's got a decent premise. Some of the characters seem intriguing, particularly Hannah and her son Sam, (though Sam's just a wee bit too cutely-mature for my taste). Loved the line from Sam's grade school-aged friend who told Nick, "My mom read your book. She said it was mostly crap."

I felt the same way about Brothers & Sisters when it first started. With a blockbuster cast, I anticipated some insightful drama. What it featured, at least at first, was unbelievable, soapy melodrama. More sledgehammers in the form of bad dialog trying to make darned sure that viewers understood the lesson of the week. I almost gave up on the show when the writers finally gave it some space and stopped forcing each character to be a cliched stereotype. And if October Road's writers don't give Nick some breathing room (there were some good Nick moments, like his panic attack), will ABC allow the show to continue on in a coveted primetime spot? Time will tell.