Everwood: A Retrospective

It is September in New York, one year after 9/11. The toxic dust is still settling in Lower Manhattan. America is At War. The Taliban has been defeated in Afghanistan, Coalition troops are securing Kabul, Karzai has been installed as President of that embattled nation. We are nearly a year away from our Mission being declared Accomplished after the unsuccessful invasion of a nation wholly unrelated to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon. The camera flies over Central Park, as if to mimic Mohamed Atta or Marwan al-Shehhi in their hijacked planes over the nearby airspace that fateful fall one year ago. It zooms into the apartment of The Browns, an affluent cosmopolitan family of four having a casual breakfast, who are about to experience a personal 9/11 of their own. Welcome to Everwood, the show: a show about wood that lasts forever, the various treatments and finishes to use, sawing and sanding techniques, etc. This renders the artistic choice to use the p...

Everwood doesn’t get the respect it deserves.  When Everwood premiered, I was a young gender binary person, though we did not yet know what that meant or why it was bad. I was struggling academically at a for-profit university that has been liquidated over 14 times and currently owned by the company that started  Pets.com . I cannot recall what drove me to watch the pilot, but probably from a commercial break during wretched WB crap like 7th Heaven - the antithesis of Everwood. The moment in that first episode when Ephram shouted to his dad “I wish you died instead of her!” and he shouted right back “Well I wish I did too, you little bastard!” I was hooked. Actually, I was actually hooked before he replied. It may not take all that much to hook me, I’m finally realizing. It’s easy to look back to 2002 say it was a more innocent time and that’s why we had more innocent shows like Everwood, but it isn’t true. We already had 9/11. We were still in the midst of a “bo...