"There was some point where Lacey had a scene where she had to cry, and she was sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. Somebody came to her and said, 'Lacey, how do you do that? How do you work yourself up to sobbing?' And she said 'I pretend that I am a woman in the middle ages being condemned to death for a crime I did not commit.'" - Co-Creator/Executive Producer Christopher Keyser on Pre-Teen Lacey Chabert's Acting Technique
Party of Five: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
On September 12, 1994, the family drama Party of Five joined Fox's Monday night schedule in a killer timeslot - the show would be competing with Monday Night Football and top-twenty hit Murphy Brown. Mass audiences failed to discover the series and the network threatened cancellation. The ratings did improve enough in the spring (after Fox moved the series to Wednesdays) that the network renewed the series, but viewership was still low enough that in December of 1995 a TV Guide cover story proclaimed Party of Five "The Best Show You're Not Watching." The series was also championed by other supporters of quality TV, leaving those of us who chose not to watch it wondering whether we were missing out on a worthy series. The release of Party of Five: The Complete First Season on DVD allows us to finally answer that question: yes.and no.
The series focuses on the San Francisco-based Salinger family. Twenty-four year old Charlie (Lost's Matthew Fox) is a well-meaning slacker who was forced to become the guardian of his four siblings when their parents were killed by a drunk driver six months earlier. Charlie works both as a bartender (at the restaurant once owned by his deceased father) and as a carpenter, but he often buckles under the responsibility of being a reluctant parent. Charlie may be the eldest in the family, but in many ways he is also the least mature. Sixteen year-old jock Bailey (Scott Wolf) struggles to help keep the family together while also navigating typical high school problems like sex, drugs, and alcohol. Julia (Neve Campbell) is a fifteen year-old sophomore who desperately wants to feel whole again after the death of her parents, even if it means hanging out with a bad crowd. Precocious eleven year-old Claudia (Lacey Chabert) is a violin prodigy (she even memorizes lines for a school production of The Crucible while playing a tune) who exerts her independence by living in a tent in the dining room. Rounding out the family is baby Owen (Brandon and Taylor Porter), a newborn at the time of the accident. Kirsten Bennett (Paula Devicq) is hired as a nanny by the harried Salinger clan, but she becomes a de facto member of the family when she and Charlie fall in love.
Party of Five plays like a hybrid of My So-Called Life and a modern-day Little House on the Prairie, but without the finely written human drama of the former or the knowingly cheese-ball hysteria of the latter. Whether it is Charlie losing all of the family's money on a bad business deal ("Pilot"), Julia's ex moving in with the Salingers to escape from an abusive father ("Fathers and Sons"), Bailey breaking up with his girlfriend because she wants to remain a virgin until she gets married ("Kiss Me Kate"), or Bailey's coming to the realization that his new girlfriend is a drug addict ("Aftershocks"), nothing is ever so bad that something worse cannot happen next week.
None of those plotlines are terrible in an of themselves, but each episode piles on one Big Moment after another, with enough water flowing from each cast member's eyes each week to generate a Poseidon Adventure-sized tidal wave. The effect is wearying. In the aptly titled "Who Cares?", for example, Bailey is travels to L.A. in a misguided effort to bring home his missing druggie girlfriend, Julia tries to help a musician friend who has just been diagnosed with HIV to write songs for one last album, and the entire family is too busy to give poor Claudia a proper birthday party. In Party of Five, everything is urgent, yet all problems are solved by innocuous Hallmark Card platitudes.
Some of the episodes do rise above the others. "Thanksgiving," for example, is an extremely moving look at the family's first holiday without their parents. Making the day even harder is the knowledge that the drunk driver who killed their parents, Walter Alcott (played by Crazy Like a Fox's John Rubinstein), has just been let out of prison and would like to apologize in person. At first, none of them want to meet with Alcott, but as the episode progresses, the individual family members learn to forgive the man - and themselves.
"Thanksgiving" is filled with truthful, dramatically sound scenes, but even when the series' writing is at its worst, the empathetic cast helps to raise the show to a higher level. Campbell is terrific at dewy-eyed innocence. Fox perfectly captures Charlie's dual nature, giving just the right mix of selfish lunkhead and caring parental figure. Wolf manages to keep Bailey sympathetic even when the character is engaging in unsympathetic behavior (like, say, dumping his girlfriend because she won't put out). Chabert is good at playing an annoying little sister without coming across as too annoying. This is an immensely likeable cast, and they will keep casual viewers watching even after the sappy storylines begin to grate. It also doesn't hurt that they are all extremely attractive.
Guest stars in the first season include Mr. Ed's Alan Young, E.R.'s Laura Innes, King of the Hill's Brittany Murphy, Star Trek: The Next Generation's Gates McFadden, Malcolm in the Middle's Jane Kaczmarek, The Tick's David Burke, and The X-Men's James Marsden.
The twenty-two episodes that make up season one are divided onto five discs. The discs are housed in a fold-out digipak which, in turn, slides into a cardboard sleeve. Each disc is decorated with a photo of a Salinger sibling while the digipak mostly contains photos of San Francisco. A booklet (which is held in a folder panel) contains episode titles and brief episode descriptions. Viewers who are new to the show may want to skip reading the descriptions as they sometimes contain spoilers.
The menu design is simple and functional - they are silent and feature group shots of the cast. Viewers can play all episodes or choose an individual one. Chapter stops are included at commercial breaks.
