TV is the New Reading

‘October Road’ is a miserably disappointing midseason entry

I think it’s possible to overidentify with wish-fulfillment storytelling and be disappointed by proxy.

In ABC’s midseason premiere of “October Road,” Nick, played by Bryan Greenberg, is a young writer growing up in economically depressed Knights Ridge, Mass., hanging out with his slacker friends and the only girl in town worth dating. He takes a graduation trip through Europe and then extends his absence by 10 years, because he promised his late mother that he would seek out “secret adventures.”

He seeks out these secret adventures in New York, and writes a “novel” that trashes his friends, his family and his hometown and it naturally achieves phenomenal success, despite its unfortunate title of “Turtle on a Snare Drum.”

And then after 10 years of the most limited possible contact with his former life, he gets roped into presenting a lecture at the local college. Since he’s having an extended bout of writers’ block anyway, he decides to head home.

He arrives and discovers that his old girlfriend, Hannah – played by Laura Prepon of “That ’70s Show” – had been pregnant when he left town and somehow no one passed this information on to him. She now has a nearly 10-year-old son who makes literary references left and right, and she’s hanging out with “Big Cat,” a deeply disturbing creep.

Naturally, she finds that she’s still deeply in love with Nick.

His other friends are a mixed bag. One of them hasn’t left his home since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the others aren’t significantly more successful. Naturally, all of them have read his novel and largely forgive him – to his face, anyway – for the horrible things he wrote about them.

And while his writing has made him so successful he glows, Nick can’t actually present anything at the lecture he showed up to present in the first place. He chokes up and dashes from the room.

So now there’s a tiny flaw of conscience in the main character that just makes him all the more endearing. How sweet.

And he decides in the end that he really should stay and follow up all the secret adventures that have been hiding in his hometown all along.

Formulaic

Really, all of this is just pause-givingly formulaic. But it wouldn’t rise to the level of wish-fulfillment without the following scene, which takes place at the bar all his friends hang out in.

Nick’s friends are all crowding around Nick like fawning puppies when a big mean drunk who keeps calling them all “dorks” decides to get violent about the way Nick left town and what he wrote about everyone. And the big mean drunk swings wide at Nick and a young college student fan of Nick’s – also a writer – lays out the big guy with a single punch.

At which point the show made me a little ill, physically – well, that or it might have been all the sweat-soaked ’80s music I didn’t even like when it was new.

I mean sure, lots of people want to be big huge successes and come back to their hometowns and discover they really are so much better and that their lives are so much more significant than all the pathetic losers they grew up with. I mean, that seems to be the general thrust behind class reunions so far as I can tell.

But it’s writers who are most often given to putting together actual stories about it. And the stories so often play out exactly like the pilot episode of “October Road,” to the point where I’m actually surprised someone greenlit this flaky, all-too-standard schlock.

In the end, Nick decides to stay.

As for me, I’m not planning to.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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