Geoff's ranking of TV Dramas. #14: ED

ED (NBC) was a dramedy that ran from 2000 to 2004, just before the Internet TV critic craze broke out. The premise behind this show is that the titular Ed Stevens(played by Tom Cavanaugh), a lawyer in New York gets a double whammy in losing his job at a law firm, and coming home to find his wife banging a mailman in his bed. He decides to return home to Stuckeyville, Ohio (admittedly the squarest name one could ever imagine) where he meets his high school crush Carol Vessey (the lovely Julie Bowen) who is now a teacher at the Stuckeyville High School. For some reason, he decides that he’s going to win her heart now, so he decides to return home for good, buys a bowling alley and sets up a law practice. He runs a bowling alley, and he’s a lawyer. Two separate things. Other characters include his best friend Josh and Josh’s wife Nancy, Carol’s best friend Molly (also a teacher), the bowling alley employees Phil, Shirley and Kenny, plus Warren (Justin Long’s breakout role) who’s a high school student.

I’m not quite sure why I started to watch this show or what got me to give it a chance. I do know that I’ve never seen the first episode, even today. Odds are that I started to watch it because Julie Bowen is HOT and they may have played that up on the NBC promos for it, but I started to watch it, and somehow it got me hooked. One key reason for this (and this is a theme you’ll see repeated throughout this blog series) is the characters, almost all of whom were pretty endearing and three-dimensional, or at least had really interesting quirks while not wearing out their on-screen welcome. While I may have initially tuned in to stare at Julie Bowen, I found out that Ed Stevens was actually a pretty cool guy. He was romantic to the point of idiocy, but he was self-aware enough to realize he was going to look dumb…and did it anyway because he believed in his heart that the girl was worth it. Beyond that, he was a very good lawyer, a good businessman, and the show was smart enough to be more of an ensemble show than just the Ed and Carol love story. I freely admit that if the entire show had been about Ed’s attempts to win Carol, I’d have stopped watching it long before it ended. Ed may have been endearing, but too many of those romantic attempts would get (and did get) annoying. Additionally, while Julie Bowen is a good actress, Carol Vessey was an exceedingly frustrating character. She’s the kind of woman who would see something/someone that was good for her, and then turn away from it and pick up something that was totally crap and bad and that didn’t want her at all. That trait of hers ran all the way through the four seasons, including the infamous “Dennis” season when John Slattery (now on “Mad Men”) played the abrasive cynical school principal whom Carol naturally pursued and became engaged to. Why she did that, only her shrink knows. I actually liked Dennis as a character; he was a refreshing dose of cynicism that helped to leaven the folksiness a bit, he did care for Carol, and when he saw that she was always going to want Ed (even when she didn’t see it) he did the right thing and left her indecisive ass at the altar. Man after my own heart, he was. But I digress…What kept me watching “Ed” was that the show’s focus on the other characters was just as strong as on Ed and Carol. The show was almost called “Stuckeyville” and there were times when that would have been a more apt description than just “Ed”.

There are quite a few thematic similarities between “Ed” and “Chuck” which I put as my #15 show. Both feature good-natured guys trying to win the hearts of chicks who are way out of their league, bothfeature supporting characters that help and hinder the main character in various wacky ways, and both rely on the supporting characters to help carry the show and make it more than just a love pursuit. Where “Ed” has a slight advantage over “Chuck” is that Ed was better able to allow its main star to take a back seat to the supporting characters and not suffer much for that. I love “Chuck”, but every episode has either been about him, or defined by his absence. “Ed” is more of a true ensemble show, with the same mix of drama and comedy that “Chuck” has, just with a more ‘realistic’ feel. Well, realistic enough, anyways.

All of the supporting characters were really well realized, and all had at least one good episode that left you feeling that they were a part of a true community that had a lot of story to tell. Honestly, the most annoying character was Carol, and I distinctly remember saying to myself during the third season that I hoped the show producers would zag instead of zig, and allow Ed to wind up with his cute new legal associate Frankie. (A FEMALE named Frankie, thank you very much). I hoped for it earnestly...until that infamous dream sequence when Ed saw Carol in that little black dress. Frankie never had a chance after that scene. Even I had to say “yo, Carol’s got it going ON.” That was in 2003, and I still see that little black dress in my mind as I write. Hell, I gotta go see if that thing is on youtube…

Yes it is. This clip is from arguably the best episode of Ed “Captain Lucidity” Season 3 ep 17. Carol’s black dress is at the 4:22 mark, but the entire video provides a great synopsis as to why Ed had to end up with Carol, as annoying as she was. For the record, the Carol in this video is a dream version, as Ed is having a lucid dream here…

In rewatching the clips, I found myself smiling a lot; the show still holds up pretty well over all this time. Sadly, it is not yet out on DVD but there are a lot of episodes out on youtube from VCR recordings (we roll old-school, yo!). I’m sure it will be released soon and very soon. Ed only ran for four seasons, and was canceled rather than allowed to end, but it did end the only way it could have. If you’ve never seen it or heard of it before, I hope you get a chance to view it and give it a shot. So, here’s to the #14 show on my list.

P.S. the first video illustrates the best running gag of the series; Ed and Mike’s $10 bets. The second is a clip show from the first two seasons.

P. P.S. Ed also featured Giniffer Goodwin in HER breakout role. She played the cutest nerd girl that you ever did see, and Warren showed that he had more sense than Ed ever did when he snapped her up.