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Second Time Around aired from September 2004 until January 2005 on UPN.
They had been married when they were young and divorced. Now, after establishing themselves with successful careers, Jackson ( Boris Kodjoe) as an architect and Ryan ( Nicole Ari Parker) as an artist with her own art gallery, they had met again, fallen back in love and remarried. Although they were determined to make their relationship work, things from their past kept popping up, particularly old lovers and issues on which they had never agreed, and there were times when they weren't sure they had made the right choice. Ryan's best friend, Coco ( Melissa De Sousa), was dubious about their prospects and believed that the remarriage was a mistake. Nigel ( Brian J. White), Jackson's free-spending younger brother, was a dentist whose fiance , Paula ( Danielle Nicolet), was an elitist snob who alienated almost everybody she met.
Stars Boris Kodjoe and Nicole Ari Parker were married in real life.
A Review from The New York Times
TV REVIEW
A Junior Detective at Hard-Boiled High
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 20, 2004
UPN has an odd new season. It has some remarkably innovative series, particularly "Veronica Mars," a coming-of-age drama about a high school loser turned amateur private eye - "Pretty in Pink" as film noir.
It also has "Second Time Around," a sitcom that begins tonight and that is almost undistinguishable from all the other UPN sitcoms about the young, black and affluent, from "Girlfriends'' to "All of Us."
"All of Us," which began last fall, is a broken-marriage comedy based on the real-life upheavals of its executive producers, the actor Will Smith and his second wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
"Second Time Around" is a repaired-marriage comedy that stars a real-life couple, Boris Kodjoe and Nicole Parker.
Mr. Kodjoe plays Jackson, a buttoned-down architect who has reconciled with his former wife, Ryan, a carefree artist. Their first scene has Ryan lounging in front of him on a white rug scattered with rose petals; it could be a scene from an Anita Baker music video or a commercial for Harveys Bristol Cream. And the rest of the show is just as commonplace. The two squabble over inconsequential things: he gets jealous when he finds out she posed nude for an artist after their divorce; she gets jealous when they run into a woman he dated after their divorce.
They are an attractive couple, but their second marriage is a bore.
"Veronica Mars," which has its premiere on Wednesday, is not at all dull, though it is an incongruous choice for UPN, a network that has mostly let the WB and Fox corner the market on teen-angst shows.
There are basically two kinds of teenage dramas on television. "My So-Called Life," on ABC 10 years ago, and ABC's new boy-centric version, "Life as We Know it," capture dead-on the slights, insecurities and life-altering humiliations of high school.
If those series revel in realism, the other subgenre can be described as magical realism, dramas that indulge teenage fantasies of power or sexual conquest. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" used myth and magic to channel young women's dreams of empowerment. Now so does "Joan of Arcadia." (Shows like "The O.C." traffic in viewers' highly romanticized notions of adolescence: high school as a soft-core porn soap opera.)
"Veronica Mars" blends the prosaic details of high school pecking orders with a solitary detective's quest for justice and revenge. Whether doing her math homework while on surveillance duty outside a cheap motel or facing down thugs, Veronica (Kristen Bell) is an amateur sleuth who is closer in spirit to Philip Marlowe than to Nancy Drew.
A loner and a loser, Veronica attends the kind of high school in Southern California where, as she puts it in her Marlowe-esque voice-over, "If you go here, your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires."
Her father, Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni), is in the servant class. He was the town sheriff but lost his badge when his investigation of the murder of Veronica's best friend, Lilly Kane, put him on the wrong side of the girl's wealthy, powerful parents. He lost his job, his home and his wife, who ran away after he fell from grace, leaving him to raise their teenage daughter. When he opens his own private detective agency, Veronica helps run it.
The murder investigation cost Veronica her mother and her cool-crowd boyfriend, Duncan, Lilly's brother, and even her virginity. (She and her father are so ostracized in the snobbish, clannish town that when she attends a party, somebody slips a date-rape drug into her drink. She awakens with no idea who took advantage of her.)
Ms. Bell has a pretty face with sharp features, and she is convincing as a hardened, bitter 17-year-old. Veronica is fearless, standing up to snotty rich kids, mean teachers and motorcycle gang members alike. She is determined to solve the mystery behind Lilly's murder and to uncover the Kane family's secrets, even when her father tries to put the case behind them.
The writers do a good job of layering surprises and plot twists. It may not be Raymond Chandler, but "Veronica Mars" is nevertheless quite hard-boiled.
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