Image B- Sound B+ Extras C+
"Pilot," "Homework," "Good Sports," "Worth Waiting For," "All's Fair," "Fathers and Sons," "Much Ado," "Kiss Me Kate," "Something Out of Nothing," "Thanksgiving," "Private Lives," "Grownups," "Not Fade Away," "It's Not Easy Being Green," "Aftershocks," "In Loco Parentis," "Who Cares?," "Brother's Keeper," "The Trouble with Charlie," "All-Nighters," "The Ides of March"
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's strange that the term "afterschool special" has hung on as a pejorative long after the death of the form it officially describes. But in a sense, it never really did leave us: hanging over much dramatic television is the spectre of issues raised but never dealt with, pain stated but never felt, emotions described without being expressed. There's a little Afterschool spirit in most hour-longs, hovering as they do over the abyss of controversy into which artistic personnel love to gaze and which the front office lives to deny. Still, the mid-'90s drama "Party of Five" is an especially bizarre example of this sort of bet-hedging and trading off, taking as it does hugely traumatic events and making them seem as threatening and life-changing as a trip to Disneyland. It's a spectacular display of cake-having and cake-eating-too that defines the Afterschool mentality, ensuring that it will raise issues without dealing with them honestly.
A quintessentially Nineties program, "Party of Five" deals metaphorically with what the then-lost Generation X was feeling in its bones. It's ostensibly about the Salingers, five orphans dealing with the loss of their parents to a drunk driver: twentyish Charlie (Matthew Fox) has inherited guardianship despite an apparent lack of initiative; teenagerish Bailey (Scott Wolf) and Julia (Neve Campbell) deal with standard growing up/getting laid trials; teenybopperish violin prodigy Claudia (creepily precocious Lacey Chabert) seems wise beyond the combined age of the rest of the cast; and babyish Owen (nameless sets of Vancouver twins) looks cute and unassuming. Its rendezvous with the zeitgeist, however, lies in its figurative relation to Gen-X self-pity: the age bracket that felt deserted by its parents and couldn't fail to see the similarity in a group of children forced to fend for themselves.
But while the X factor is literal trauma and the Y factor is symbolic abandonment, the graph itself levels off quickly and never rises to acceptable levels of potency. This is because the show is completely sanitized for your protection; despite the constant trials of the Salingers (named, predictably, for the author of the one book young non-readers have read), nothing registers beyond low-level angst–no matter what happens, the family stays together in a huge bourgeois house and never has to worry about money. Sure, there's much talk of struggling to get by, but you never feel the financial pinch–the standard of living stays completely the same, and Charlie seems to start up furniture design companies with funds from the Bank of Middle-earth. The show's appeal is the same as its failure: it sympathizes with you without challenging you, raising the threat of disaster only to snatch it away and reassure you that everything will work out.
This also applies to the dynamics of the children. No matter what suffering the Salingers withstand (including a drug-addicted girlfriend (Megan Ward) for Bailey, working underaged at a bar for Julia, the suppression of personal desires for guardian Charlie, and so on), the angst is usually identified, stuffed into a monologue, and cathartically dispelled by the rolling of the credits. Yes, you're suffering, it says, but we care, and people who care can withstand anything. In reality, "I feel your pain" can be some cold comfort and perhaps an insult–but then, we're dealing with a series that perpetrated the character of Claudia, the insanely peppy 11-year-old who is somehow the most stable person in the household. Any other preteen would be terrified by the Salinger household's tenuous grip on stability, but instead of panic she blithely asserts herself at every turn of the screw–even her fears, such as the episode in which she's rattled by an earthquake and its aftershocks, are rendered purely humorous, as if a kid couldn't possibly have problems that rank with those of her elders.
Of course, network television didn't contend with cable in any serious way back then–without the brutal frankness of "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under", you could get away with calling this show something approaching quality television. But time has not been kind to "Party of Five", which now exists largely as a throwback to a bygone era. It's fascinating in how it waters down the Kurt Cobain mentality (himself a watering-down of the first-wave punk ethos) to authenticate the issues textual and subtextual it fails to address. Day or night in Partyworld, it's always afterschool.
THE DVD
Columbia TriStar's five-disc set of "Party of Five: The Complete First Season" barely passes muster where it counts: the full-frame image is often blurry and indistinct, with a bleached-out, yellowy tone that blows whatever colour saturation might be salvagable. It's by no means horrendous, but it will nag at videophiles and laymen alike. The Dolby 2.0 Surround sound is a step up, more for its faultless professionalism than for any whiz-bang inherent in these mixes. Extras begin with "'Party of Five': A Look Back", which ought to be a single featurette but which the sadists at Columbia carved up into mini-featurettes that try your patience with recycled credit scrolls. The breakdown, for what it's worth, goes like this:
How It Began (5 mins.)
Creators Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman explain the origins of the series–far more upbeat and frothy before the pair added realism. Among the beans spilled: the part of Charlie was initially written for a woman, but the network got cold feet.
The Cast (10 mins.)
Wolf, Chabert, Campbell, and Paula Devicq (Charlie's paramour) join the creators in discussing the casting process. Wolf pathetically admits that he cried reading the pilot script while Torontonian Campbell, a vet of Canadian TV's "Catwalk", reveals that she was in L.A. for all of two weeks before landing the role of Julia.
A Happy Place (7 mins.)
A tribute to the fact that the cast got along so well. No shocking disclosures, but you do begin to wish you worked there.
Dogs and Babies (5 mins.)
Another network-imposed restriction–that of anaesthetized bulldog Thurber–shares time with the numerous identical twins playing Owen in this needless segment. Learn how a) the pooch had foul breath, and b) babies have a habit of squirming and screaming. Stop the presses!
Fan Mail (6 mins.)
A breakdown of fan response, from the bereaved children who related to the series to the mall tours full of screaming teenage girls.
The Show Hits Its Stride (5 mins.)
The cast and creators speculate on the point at which the show crystallized, as well as the odd demographics and letter-writing campaigns that kept the network from cancelling it despite ratings that were located somewhere down in the Nielsen basement.
Golden Globes (7 mins.)
The surprise nomination and bombshell win of the show at the '95 Golden Globes. Shock and elation abound.
Remembering "Party of Five" (5 mins.)
An emotional cast recalls their favourite episodes and summons up what they loved and missed about the set atmosphere. "No dirt," says Chabert.
"Party of Five" Abroad (5 mins.)
Various clips of foreign-dubbed episodes intercut with interviews with the cast. Most of them haven't heard these versions, but think the idea is very funny.
Separate from the piecemeal retrospective, find:
"Party of Five": A Family Album (16 mins.)
A wholly needless featurette that reiterates most of the points in the epic recounted above for no apparent reason. Possibly produced under different circumstances, though I can't imagine what.
Commentary Tracks
Cast (Wolf, Fox, and Chabert) and crew (Keyser, Lippman) get separate commentary tracks on three episodes: the pilot, "Thanksgiving", and the season finale, "The Ides of March." Though the performers do have the odd trivia tidbit to divulge, they're preoccupied with the dated hairstyles; far more thematically inclined are the creators, and they rattle off the ways the studio tried to soften what they were trying to accomplish. Pointedly, there is no bitterness on that last point.
Trailers for 50 First Dates, "Dawson's Creek", Go, and The Company round out the package along with a promo for Columbia Tri-Star television box sets.
44 minutes/episode; NR; 1.33:1; English Dolby Surround; CC; 5 DVD-9s; Region One; Columbia TriStar
