Series / Everwood

Everwood was a drama series that ran from 2002-06 on what was then The WB, starring Treat Williams as Dr. Andrew Brown (unlike most of the WB's shows, this was cancelled when it merged with UPN to create The CW). After the death of his wife, Brown left his prestigious position at a New York hospital, packed up his teenage son and nine-year-old daughter, and left the big city for the quiet, sleepy mountain town of Everwood, Colorado.

According to Television Without Pity, its stories were often pure cheese in concept, but executed so awesomely they could only sputter, "Damn you, Berlanti!"

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This show provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • Rose's mother was psychologically abusive to the point of bullying her.
  • Reid's mom is portrayed as emotionally distant (until she has a very strong wake-up call).
  • Irv's daughter resented her mother.
  • Madison's mother was distant enough that she wasn't told about the pregnancy.
• Alpha Bitch: Delia's friend Brittany is a toned-down, younger version. She has a posse of friends and is rather haughty.
• Artistic License – Law: Madison and Ephram's relationship is said by other characters to be "illegal" but in real life their relationship is actually perfectly legal under the "Close in Age" exception clause in the Colorado law for statutory rape

• The Beard: Turns out that Nina was a Beard for her gay husband. They have a long-distance marriage as he's travelling salesman or agent. Nina is extremely upset when she finds out he cheats on her with a guy. She had no idea he was gay. This effectively ends their marriage.

• Big Brother Instinct: For all they annoy each other and often conflict, Bright and Amy are really close and he's quite overprotective whenever he feels she might be in danger or treated unfairly.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  Lanie: I've got to break something to you.
  Ephram: You're married?
  Lanie: No.
  Ephram: You're leaving the country?
  Lanie: Stop.
  Ephram: You're marrying Bright and then leaving the country?
• Broken Pedestal: Happens twice to poor Ephram in the second half of season one:
  • Ephram finds out his mother had been cheating on his father, probably right up until she died.
  • Ephram's piano teacher has to leave town because he got one of his female students pregnant.

• Cliffhanger: The first season finale. Colin Hart's fate is not revealed until the second season premiere.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Andy Brown is frequently considered this; he's completely okay with it.
  Edna: Remind me again why you're offering this thankless town free medicine?
  Andy: Well, the long answer is that after fifteen years of making money off of other people's sickness, I've decided to alleviate my guilt by doing something incredibly altruistic. The short answer is: I'm nuts!
• Coming-Out Story: Kyle, one of Ephram's piano students in the fourth season, comes out as gay. Kyle's mother is glad that Kyle finally has a good male role model. Ephram tries to help Kyle's improve his social skills, since he's alone and mostly awkward around his peers. When Reid suggests Kyle is likely gay, Ephram thinks he's too young to come out and that high school kids will be jerks about it. Kyle denies it at first but eventually decides to come out. Ephram successfully coaches Kyle into Juilliard.
• Compound Title: The beginning of season 3. First episode was titled "For Every Action..." and "...There Is a Reaction" was the name of the second one.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the first episode, Andy tells Delia she'll get a pony if she's willing to move to Everwood. Then when the Andy-Linda plot rolls around:
    Andy: The thing is, I promised Delia I wouldn't date her.
    Edna: You also promised Delia a horse; I don't see Mr. Ed clomping around!
  • Delia gets her horse in the series finale. She's beyond happy.

• Cut Short: The show was cancelled when WB merged with UPN into The CW - one of the few WB shows that got this fate.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Irv's daughter Cassie thought this was the case for most of her life, choosing to resent her mother and later Edna for the fact that she hadn't seen her father in the last five years. Irv firmly shuts this down, telling Cassie that he deserves some of the blame for not being around as much when she was a kid.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Amy's junkie boyfriend Tommy, in the second season. Her father is usually ok with her dating, for example he had no problems with Colin, but he forbids her this relationship. She insists she will help him stop but she starts using drugs herself. (They break up before it gets pretty bad.)
• December–December Romance: Edna and Irving get married when they are both in their sixties or so. They don't give a rats' ass what the town think about it. There were some who didn't approve.
• Deadpan Snarker: Ephram. It's his self-defense mechanism. He snarks at his father, his sister Delia, at Amy when he wants to tease her, at Bright... He's sarcastic with everybody.
• Driven to Suicide: Reid, Ephram and Bright's room-mate from season 4, when he fails out of medical school and cheats on a test. He is caught and expelled. His friends all feel guilty for not realizing that Reid was depressed. Upon recovery, Reid pretends everything is fine, which understandably upsets them, and Hannah calls him on it.
• Elegant Classical Musician: Ephram, the handsome and brilliant pianist.
  • Played Straight: Ephram Brown is a brilliant pianist. Amy Abbott, his love interest and his eventual girlfriend, likes Ephram's playing a lot. She admires his dedication to music and his immense talent.
  • Discussed Trope: In a flashback, Ephram's mum tells him that girls find his playing very attractive. She's convinced that they sense he's very confident when he plays.
  • Invoked Trope: Mrs. Brown was quite a matchmaker. She tried to invoke the trope as she makes Ephram accidentally meet his crush and invite her for his piano recital.
• Fashion Hurts: What Delia learns when wearing uncomfortable stockings.
• First Girl Wins: Ephram falls for Amy the moment he sets his eyes on her. He pines for her, then has a relationship with another girl, goes back to pining for Amy, they get together, break up and get back together at the end of the series.
• First Period Panic: Delia Brown falls in the category of girls who know what is happening, but whose mom is dead and who have no female figure to talk to (except Andy offers to ask their friendly neighbour Nina). She gets her first period like a champ. She's not feeling too well, but insists she wants to play ice-hockey (she's a major tomboy and her teammates depend on her). She's embarrassed when her father tells her coach and he repeats it out loud in front of all the boys who laugh at her. Also, she's thrown off balance a bit when she goes shopping for pads with her dad — brand Always doesn't sound good, but Andy assures her it usually lasts from 3 to 7 days. Her cramps are pretty bad, too, because when Andy suggests she takes pain killers, she asks if she can have ten.
• From New York to Nowhere: The Browns move from New York to Everwood, Colorado, because Andy's dead wife wanted them to. They don't particularly enjoy it, but somehow Andy sticks to his plan.
• Happily Married:
  • Dr. Abbott and his wife Rose are very happy together. He's a doctor and she's a mayor, yet they both consider their family and especially their children their biggest success.
  • Edna and Irving. They had their problems, but managed to deal with them. Edna is devastated when Irv dies. She tries to be stoic, but admits that she misses him terribly and feels useless.
• Heroism Incentive: In the pilot episode, Andy tries to convince his 15-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter to move to the titular rural town in Colorado.
  Andy: Now, I want this to be a democratic decision, so we're going to put this to a vote. Everyone who wants to move...
  [Nobody moves]
  Andy: ...and get their own horse, raise your hand.
  [Delia raises her hand excitedly]

• Jerk Jock: Bright for the first half of season one. He's a popular football player, a star to everyone but he's mean to the less popular crowd, especially new-comer Ephram. He gets better and takes a liking to Ephram and eventually they become best friends. He also stops playing football and wants to focus on academic pursuits, much to his father's distress because their original plan for Bright's college education was to get a sports scholarship.

• Literally Loving Thy Neighbor: Andy (widowed) and Nina (married, then divorced) are neighbours and they become friends pretty fast as nice Nina seems to be one of the few who understands Andy. They get together romantically in the final season and seal the deal in the finale.
• Love-Obstructing Parents:
  • Andy heavily opposes Ephram and Madison at first. He's very fond of Madison but doesn't approve of their being together because of the age difference.
  • Harold doesn't like Tommy at all. Hard to blame him when a junkie and dealer dates his little girl who is heart-broken over the death of her first boyfriend.
• Missing Mom:
  • Julia dies. Ephram is a young teenager and Delia about six when that happens.
  • Edna was absent for a large part of Harold's childhood.
  • It's mentioned that Andy's mother died when he was relatively young (though possibly already a doctor).
  • Brittany's mother is out of the picture (she lives with her father and step-mother).
  • Several patients have a dead or disappeared mother.
• Mistaken for Gay: Bright is convinced Reid is gay and tells Amy as such after seeing how he loves to work out and hearing he used to live with a partner. (Said partner was strictly business, someone he worked as an EMT with.)
• Mistaken for Junkie: Delia thinks Linda is doing drugs. She's actually administering medicine because she is HIV positive.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Irving Harper becomes a writer. He writes a fairly successful book about people from Everwood.

• Near-Death Clairvoyance: Sort of. Andy's deceased wife appears a few times to discuss the difficulties of parenting with him; the first few of these are actually "replays" in Andy's mind of conversations they'd had before, but the last one is completely original.
• Non-Idle Rich: Dr. Brown's personal fortune amassed as a world-renowned neurosurgeon is large enough for him to operate a private medical practice, free of charge.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: A milder example. Andy Brown is a specialist of neurosurgery, but opens up a general practice in Everwood, and has no difficulties delivering a baby with shoelaces and a whisk.
• One-Word Title: Because it's The Place, as it's the setting of the story.
• Parent with New Paramour:
  • Dr. Andy Brown is a widower; the death of his wife and the family dealing with their grief kicked off the series. His young daughter Delia doesn't like when he dates Linda Abbott, and his son Ephram disapproves also, but mainly because she's ill and he's afraid that Delia will become attached and they will have to go through it yet again. At the end of the series, Andy gets together with his friendly neighbor Nina. Both Ephram and Delia have always liked her, so they will probably be okay with it.
  • When divorced, Nina dates Jake, another newcomer and a young handsome doctor. Her son Sam seems to like him.
  • Edna, a Cool Old Lady married Irving Harper, who was in turn a Cool Old Guy. It was a wonderful case of December-December Romance and a Happily Married couple. In a flashback, the audience finds out that Edna's son Harold was against the marriage, which hurt Edna's feelings. Irving's children were fairly estranged from him anyway, but were no fans either.
• The Place: Everwood is set in Everwood. One-Word Title variation.
• Portmantitle: Fusion of "Ever" and "Wood".

• Scenery Porn: The town of Everwood doesn't have much going for it, but the scenery is amazing.
  Andy Brown: I MOVED INTO A SNOWGLOBE!

• Teens Are Monsters: Averted. The teenage characters could be volatile and cause the adults grief, but the adults weren't always perfect either and most of the arguments were shown from both sides, displaying real conflict rather than standards kids versus parents.

• The Topic of Cancer: Rose Abbott has cancer at the end of season 3 and still deals with it throughout season 4. She hates that it burdens her family, for example her daughter gets to Ivy league school but chooses to go to a local community college to take care of her and the rest of the family. Or before her illness, Rose and Andy consider adoption because bringing up kids was the most satisfying thing in their life, but the adoption process is stopped because her cancer (and because Andy lied about it on their application).
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: A few times with Ephram and Amy. S1: Ephram —> Amy. S2: Amy —> Ephram. S4: Ephram —> Amy then Amy —> Ephram.

• World of Snark: Nearly everyone has snide comments for their family and friends. Ephram, Delia, and Andy in the Brown family; Harry, Bright, Edna, and sometimes Rose in the Abbott family; and often the patients snark at their doctors. Drs. Brown and Abbott often engage in Snark-to-Snark Combat—their rivalry soon changes to sympathetic banter and eventually they become friends with a healthy dose of sarcasm from both sides.

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