Ever wonder what we’d get if another network attempted a CW-style show created by people completely out of the pop cultural loop? Well wonder no more. ABC has done it in “October Road," and the results aren’t pretty.
The first sign of trouble is in the music. As the show opens, the words “Summer, 1997” appear on the screen. The camera, with an appropriately nostalgic sepia tone, pans over a high-schooler’s room, complete with the requisite Kurt Cobain poster. A young couple makes out in bed.
But then the music kicks in. It’s “Don’t Look Back” by Boston, the late-seventies power pop group.
Warning bells go off. Unless our recent grad Nick (Bryan Greenberg, “Prime”) has an ironic interior soundtrack, someone has gotten the music very wrong. The song evokes images of bong hits in the back of a Scooby Doo van circa 1978, not of a restless small-town guy in the post-grunge 90s.
As it turns out, the song choice is not ironic. It’s genuinely intended to conjure up feelings of longing, and like much of the rest of “October Road,” it's out of tune.
“Road,” airing Thursdays at 10, is about a hot young New York novelist who returns to the small town he left a decade earlier only to discover that the residents of Knight’s Ridge are more than a bit miffed over how they were portrayed in his barely fictional first novel.
Despite a few charming performances, “Road” is one long series of unconvincing motivations, missed emotional moments and uncomfortably false banter. It feels like a fortysomething guy’s way-off-base notion of how late-twentysomethings behave. It’s “One Tree Hill” meets “The Big Chill,” two pieces of work that were never intended to meet.
Our story: Nick, struggling with writer’s block as he works on his second novel, agrees to his agent’s suggestion that he return to his hometown to teach a writing seminar and hopefully jumpstart his creative juices.
There he encounters Hannah (Laura Prepon, “That 70’s Show”), the girlfriend he abandoned 10 years earlier, and her 9-year-old Sam (Slade Pearce, “Air Buddies”). He also gets re-acquainted with his dad (Tom Berenger, “Platoon”) and his old buddies, Owen (Brad William Henke, “Hollywoodland”), Ikey (Evan Jones, “8 Mile”) and Eddie (Geoff Stults, “7th Heaven"), who is particularly bitter about his portrayal in Nick’s book.
Little of it works, from the musical misfires to the forced camaraderie. The early New York scenes are laughable, as when we see Nick revisiting the tiny apartment where he lived before making it big to commune with his old writing desk.
Knight’s Ridge is one of those only-on-television small towns from “Northern Exposure” and “Gilmore Girls.”
And how does Nick reconnect with his old buddies? By way of a group air guitar performance of Thin Lizzy’s 1976 song “The Boys are Back in Town.” Though it's a decent enough song, it's the wrong song, again, and yet more proof that the writers don’t have a clue as to what kind of music guys who grew up in the mid-1990s would listen to or jam to.
The soap opera plot elements never get off the ground either.
Is Sam really Nick's son? Hannah assures him he isn't, but she's not very convincing, and that's intended to create some of the mystery of “October Road." But for that to work there has to be some chemistry between Nick and Sam, and there is none. Hannah has a boyfriend, intended to set up a rivalry for Hannah's affections, but he's a preening lunkhead, which makes impossible to take seriously as romantic rival.
The actors aren’t to blame. Greenberg, as Nick, is passable, if a little passive. Prepon gives Hannah the appropriate mix of resentment and hope at Nick’s return. And Nick’s buddies are all fine, especially Henke as Owen, who has embraced marriage and fatherhood with a relish that's engaging.
But decent acting cannot save a show that gets it all wrong. If ever there was a road better left less traveled, “October Road” is it.
