On Everwood

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It was the mother who first believed in Everwood. As a little girl she gazed out at the small Colorado town, her train stopped because of snow, and that place became a part of her. She believed in Everwood, not as a patriotic fanatic, but as if God had made this place for people like her–for people like her husband Dr. Andy Brown and their two children Ephram and Delia.

Dr. Brown took his family there after his wife, his children’s mother, died in a car accident. The world famous neurosurgeon fled from Manhattan to the place his wife loved so much, keeping the one promise he was last able to keep after years of broken promises and missed opportunities.

And so it was, this doctor would have to mend his relationship with an estranged 16-year-old son and raise his 9-year-old daughter, alone. Things didn’t work out at first, with such exchanges as “I hate you,” “Well I hate you right back” making up many moments early in the series. But something happens. Maybe it was a father putting things right. Maybe it was a son coming to terms with parental imperfection. Maybe it was the mother who had sent them their in the first place. Regardless though, everything is right after four years in Everwood.

Is that all it takes sometimes? The obsessive belief in something, be it God or another person or an ideal, that makes things work in the end. Probably not, but Everwood made me want to believe. I wanted to believe that two high school sweet hearts could fall in love and have a daughter named Amy who would eventually fall in love with someone who always seemed more than just a sweetheart. I wanted to believe that a town of 3000 in Colorado would accept a black man marrying a white woman. I wanted to believe that some promises will always be kept. And I did believe.

I can’t impartially describe why the show Everwood worked the way it did, though it did take four years to do what most series would do in one season. The third and fourth seasons, however, were the true tests of faith. The target of Ephram’s affections Amy Abbot, Ephram, Dr. Brown, Dr. Brown’s neighbor and love interest Nina, and many other main characters all have the chance to leave Everwood. They don’t, though.

People did come and go, leaving behind pieces to the puzzle of why the core cast won’t ever leave the mountain town. I’m sure one character, Stephanie, introduced as the other woman in Ephram’s life late in Season 4 will leave Everwood too. She gave Everwood a try and it didn’t stick. Maybe she wasn’t the Tin Man. Maybe she wasn’t pure of heart.

Like Oz, Everwood is a place for special people. I don’t believe Dorthy would have left Oz had it not made for a definitive ending to the film, just like I don’t believe the people who truly saw the magic of Everwood will ever leave it. I can picture Ephram’s wrinkled hand’s delicately caressing the keys of his piano, a piano that could have lead him to Julliard but didn’t because Everwood had other plans. I can picture Amy Abbot, her grey hair in a bun, reading women’s studies or feminist theory, on a couch in the living room that she shared with Ephram since they were married so many years ago. They will have made life beautiful, her as a college professor and Ephram as a music teacher, helping the other people who may find their way to Everwood see what they have found. Some of them can’t see it, and they understand. But some others do and those are the people who know what it is to love and fail and succeed in spite, the people who try even when they don’t want to and the ones who find a way to make the world right. At least that little corner of the world.

Everwood wasn’t a perfect place, but much like the Island on Lost, it knew who the good people were. That’s why Dr. Brown’s wife Julia had to find that mountain town and that’s why Irv Harper, the husband of Dr. Brown’s nurse and Dr. Abbot’s mother, made it the last place he would ever live. I’m sure Julia found her way there too, in spite of Andy’s insistence on flying to New York to see her grave before he asked Nina to marry him. In that final instance, he did forget that Julia is the one who sent him to Everwood, but he did remember in that final trip to New York that her death was the consequence not being the good person that Everwood demanded.

In truth though, Everwood was a place for flawed people, even if they lived there their whole lives. I understand that the lives of Ephram and Amy and the rest didn’t end when the camera panned up over Everwood during the final episode. They lived and hurt and felt the pain that comes with life, at least in the fictional world they would still live in. But, I don’t think they would have dealt with it the same way had they not been in Everwood.

Everwood was a fairytale land for sure, and the one thing I regret about the final episode was not having Irv Harper lead us out like the narrator of any good fable. He, more than anyone else in the show, knew the power of Everwood. He even wrote a book about it. Had he been given the chance, one final say at how the story would have ended, I imagine that it would go something like this.

“So the girl stayed with the boy, the doctor had healed his heart, the couple had received their long-awaited child, the widow had found her place, and a young man and a young woman had discovered the love they once shared was the only one they ever needed. In that little mountain town, the people who had love to share finally found others to share it with. And they all lived happily ever after.”

Good-bye, Everwood.