'Men in Trees' will be missed
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
The final episode of this well-made series is yet another example of network policy in action.
A week from today, the town of Elmo, Alaska, will cease to exist. "Men in Trees," the TV series that takes place there and whose penultimate episode airs tonight, has been felled by the American Broadcasting Company. I have seen its end, and if it is not a conclusion as such -- you can see how a third season might spring from the unresolved business of the second -- it has been modeled into something resembling one, and it's a conclusion both satisfying and, since it is a conclusion, bittersweet.
I am sorry to see them go, the fictional people of this fictional town -- Marin and Jack and Patrick and Annie and Ben and Sara and Teresa and Jerome and Buzz and Mai and Celia -- because I like them and the show that contains them, which is well made in most every way that shows are made and comes with lovely, Alaska-adjacent rugged Canadian scenery attached. And because romantic comedy is a genre to be cherished and tended and encouraged to grow, for the psychic health of the nation.
On the other hand, "Men in Trees" is already twice the length of "Berlin Alexanderplatz," time enough for any series that knows what it's about to say its piece, and will bow out without ever becoming bad. There are few enough episodes -- 36 -- that the story arc is still legible from beginning to end, not hidden in a cloud of increasingly less relevant and likely digressions. The game in American TV is to run forever, but the ones that last usually go on too long.
There was not that much new under the sun in Elmo; what was fresh was the grown-up intelligence that animated the series, the characters who emerged and the performers who brought them to life. Beginning as the story of Marin Frist (Anne Heche), a "relationship coach" and author who comes to Alaska on a book tour and stays to know herself better, "Men in Trees" is often described as "Sex and the City" meets "Northern Exposure." Creator Jenny Bicks was a veteran of the first series, which also featured a woman who wrote about love and, like the second, it takes place in an Alaskan small town populated by improbably colorful characters and centers on an attraction between an urban sophisticate and an earthy local (James Tupper as Jack, not only taciturn but actually inarticulate). But it is also like a lot of other shows about places where everybody knows your name -- basic TV stuff.
