Note: This is one of my list of the 400 Most Notable TV Shows Set in New York City, in honor of the 400th Anniversary of the founding of NYC - the full explanation and list of titles can be found by clicking my username (DeanNYC) and looking for the list on my Profile Page.
Reviews of each show are being posted under their respective titles.
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The series "Party of Five" was a big deal in its first couple of seasons. It was intriguing because the Salinger family of San Francisco, essentially kids (though granted most of the actors were playing a lot younger than their actual ages), were orphans and trying to both put food on the table (quite literally, as they ran a restaurant), and get through their scholastics while holding their tenuous family circumstances together.
It had elements of a soap opera to it with the drama of Child Protective Services possibly coming in to end it all if eldest sibling Charlie wasn't living up to their requisite expectations, in addition to all of the standard teen issues you would expect with junior high and high schoolers under normal conditions.
Eventually younger brother Bailey, played by Scott Wolf, got into a relationship with a girl named Sarah, and it looked like they might be headed to an engagement. But it broke off. And Sarah, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, did something drastic. She left San Francisco for New York.
We were told that the reason why she left was because she was in pursuit of information about her birth parents, who were New Yorkers - she was chasing her roots.
There also was a question about whether this might have been an "absence makes the heart grow fonder" situation. After all, we were told this was only going to be a temporary exploration and Sarah seemed to want to get back with Bailey.
To be sure, there were a few episodes where that search for parental facts was the focus. But it seemed like that took a back seat to most of the actual stories we got.
For the late 1990s early 2000s, maybe Sarah wasn't completely prepared for the culture shock the move she made would create. More importantly, neither were the writers of this series. Sarah fell into a bohemian lifestyle with an apartment, new friends, new co-workers at her waitressing job just down the block from her dwelling, her attempts to become a recording artist (which may have been a nod to Hewitt's actual, and mostly unsuccessful, attempts to get her own singing career going in the US) a few love interests and all of the elements of randomness, oddities and potential trouble that come with life in The City.
Part of the problem was that Sarah wasn't particularly well-developed... as a CHARACTER, so she wasn't really an ideal candidate to be the star of this show. No offense to Ms. Hewitt, who has had a pretty decent career and can currently be seen on "9-1-1" (after Fox canceled it, the Alphabet Network snapped it up). But her acting at the time was not of the same level as "Felicity" star, Keri Russell, and that hurt the program, certainly by comparison.
It also didn't help that a couple of co-stars, Jennifer Garner, who was actually playing an aspiring actress, and Pauley Perrette, who was an up-and-coming model on the series, were very poorly used. But, don't worry about them too much; they both found better opportunities relatively soon after this series.
New York played a part because of the flavor of the city, that sense that anything could happen, the connections of wealth and fame, seemingly just within your reach and the compromises one is willing to make to be able to be there.
Ultimately though, "Time of Your Life" was a case of a central character not having a central focus and without that, it was like a boat without a rudder. That's really why this didn't work out.
