When good TV goes bad: how Party of Five ran out of Dickensian misfortune

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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...-party-of-five

Pull a plaid shirt over your dungarees and journey with me – not to Dalston circa 2017 but to San Francisco in September 1994, where five orphans are trying to make their way in the world with nary a parent to help them. These are the Salingers, Fox’s great hope to retain the teen market it had nabbed with the glitzy, multi-parented Beverly Hills 90210. Five kids fending for themselves was a clever and enticing premise because who among us didn’t, after a particularly hormonal teenage day, lie in bed with tears drying on our cheeks and imagine a life in which we were tragically orphaned and left to heroically fend for ourselves, ultimately starring in the Oscar-winning film telling the story of our lives?

Like its spirit-sister My So-Called Life, Party of Five was acclaimed for its deft handling of teen strife, but little-watched. It wasn’t until the series won a Golden Globe in 1996 that it became popular. Leaving two teens, a tween, a baby and the family restaurant in the hands of their 24-year-old playboy brother certainly sewed the seeds of the drama that would maintain the series for six seasons. Caretaker Charlie (the dashing Matthew Fox) and dreamboat Bailey (Scott Wolf) didn’t have much more than looks and charm going for them, but Julia (Neve Campbell) and Claudia (Lacey Chabert) were preternaturally talented at writing and violin respectively, not that it really got either of them anywhere other than providing a lot of existential “but what if I don’t want this book deal/Juilliard scholarship that has fallen into my lap” angst in later series. Owen was the baby but no one really talked about him until he was mobile enough to run away.

What made the show work was the fact that these kids were very real. They were selfish, angsty and confused but struggling not to be, and you rooted for them. Just as well, since the showrunners threw everything they had at the Salingers. Losing their parents to a drunk-driver wasn’t enough – in the first three series alone they dealt with an estranged grandfather, drug abuse, HIV, depression, infertility, a jilting, a dead girlfriend, a heart attack, a fire, child abuse, abortion, miscarriage, suicide and alcoholism.

It made sense, then, that the big C should make an appearance as the writers ran out of Dickensian misfortune to throw at them. In season four, Charlie was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Rather than pulling together, the family splintered. Perhaps understandably, Charlie couldn’t see himself surviving and retreated inwards, with his siblings barely trying to reach him. What should have been a heart-rending storyline felt more like “Christ, what now?”. Poor Claudia became our avatar, so traumatised by the past three years all she could do was wander the streets asking God why. Everyone became resentful, isolated and sad, and the lightness, relatability and sense of family with which the characters had navigated every other horrifying event in their lives was lost. Sniping, self-obsession and anger took over, making the show hard but also kind of boring to watch. Charlie may have recovered, but Party of Five never quite did.