OK, this post is just going to be me getting all nostalgic about one of my favorite shows ever.  Yeah, Party of Five was a sappy show, but it was a well-written sappy show with deeply flawed and loveable characters that I suffered with each week.  It was a show that started with a sad premise — a tragic accident orphans five siblings — and sustained that melancholy throughout the life of the series.  It should have been too painful to work, and yet I watched from the pilot through six straight seasons without missing an episode.

Actually the set-up was brilliant.  Upon the death of their parents, the Salingers were kept together because the oldest brother was old enough to be a legal guardian to all of them.  Of course, Charlie (who was played by Matthew Fox) was more immature than his teenaged brother Bailey, teenaged sister Julia and pre-teen sister Claudia.  They threw in a baby brother, Owen, as well, which grounded the show even more, forcing all the siblings to face their responsiblities to each other in a more concrete way.  And that’s really what the show was about — maintaining a family bond in the face of impossible odds.

Don’t get me wrong.  It was not all heaviness and despair.  Party of Five could be quite funny.  But it was the emotional core of the story that kept me coming back.  That, and the aforementioned writing and acting.  In addition to Fox, who is now the mainstay of another of my favorite shows, Lost, this show gave us Jennifer Love Hewitt, as Bailey’s girlfriend, and Neve Campbell as Julia.  But my favorites were two others in the cast.  Lacey Chabert played Claudia, the youngest daughter, who started the series at age 9 or 10.  Unlike her older siblings, who were all old enough to escape the house and try to have lives, and her baby brother who was clueless, Claudia was  the most stuck and lost without parents.  Chabert played the part brilliantly, breaking your heart regularly even as she triumphed over the continuous stupidity of her siblings.  Sometimes you watch an actor grow up on a series and end up pulling for them for the rest of their career.  The other great performance was by Paula Devicq, who started the show at the baby’s nanny, Kirsten, and ended up as Charlie’s wife and moral compass.  If I was a Hollywood producer, I’d be looking for ways to work with both of these actresses.

In a way, this show is a lot like Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which also asked the question of whether a young person can grow up fast enough to become a parent to a younger sibling.  And just like that book, the answer is unexpected and comforting at the same time.  There just aren’t a lot of family dramas on TV anymore, so if you’ve been craving one, I’d recommend renting the first season of Party of Five.  Hell, I even got misty a couple of times (including at a pivotal moment in the Kirsten-Charlie relationship where Jann Arden’s Good Mother on the soundtrack nearly killed me).  And if a show can make me tear up, that’s good television.