is shot, Williams is piloting his other aircraft, a kinder, gentler, twin-engine Seneca--a gracious concession to his jittery journalist passenger. The sapphire sky is glassy smooth. The hills below ablaze with fall color. And suddenly, Williams
"So this is what I want you to do," says Williams, his tenor voice crackling over the headphones. "I want you to take the controls." You blanch. Horrific images and Daily Variety headlines flash through your mind ("EVERWOOD STAR, JOURNO DIE IN FURRY PLANE CRASH") "Okay, don't white-knuckle it," says Williams, demonstrating his technique- gentle nudges on either handle. "Now slowly take her up a bit." The plane rises, as if perched atop a balloon that has suddenly inflated. "Now, take her down. Congratulations! You've just flown a plane," says Williams. " Nothing to it, right?"
Actually, you're too stunned to speak. Kinda like finding out your school is having an outbreak of "gonorrhea of the throat," or the girl who you think likes you is only flirting with you to get your dad to perform life-saving surgery on her comatose boyfriend- to mention just a couple of the many disconcerting narrative twists on Everwood. Williams plays arrogant New York City neurosurgeon Andrew Brown, who reacts to the sudden death of his wife by moving his angry, piano progidy son Ephram (19-year-old breakout Gregory Smith) and tomboy daughter Delia (A Beautiful Mind's Vivien Cardone) to an idyllic mountain town packed with quirky locals.
Unabashedly sentimental yet peppered with a salty sense of humor, Everwood would be just likes it's hit lead-in, 7th Heaven, if all of Reverend Camden's kids were half jewish, and they all yelled at Dad a lot and referred to him as "a dick." Pulling in 6.4 million viewers a week, the series tweaks the feminine formula (see: Buffy, Felicity, Gilmore Girls) that has long fueled the network's business. "The father-son relationship is new to us," says Jordan Levin, president of The WB. "We've had success with young women, but we haven't really portrayed young men to extent we wanted to. That's been a mission for us."
Leading The WB's new masculine Williams, who, after years of ups (1979's Hair; an Emmy-nominated turn as Michael Ovitz in the 1996 HBO flick The Late Shift) and downs (the direct-to-video Substitute series), may have finally found himself an honest-to-goodness star vehicle. His performance in Everwood is not disimilar to how he pilots his Seneca: confident yet casual, thoughtful and generous. "I used to be terrified of flying," says Smith. "But Treat has totally cured me... The way he explains everything and takes care of you- I'm not scared of flying anymore." Speak for yourself, kid.
THE NEXT DAY, ON THE SET OF Everwood, things are getting kind of cheesy. A freak fall blizzard has hit, trapping almost all the series regulars inside Dr. Brown's home. Meanwhile, Ephram's maternal grandparents have shown up to take him back to New York. Ephram wants to go; Dad wants him to stay. An exchange of cold sarcasm escalates into an emotional firefight of resentment- and all the while Dad piles cubes of Swiss on a platter for his snow-bound guests. Afterward, Williams and Smith unwind by squaring off in mock kung-fu poses. "Now that was a cheesy bit of business," says Williams. "No," says Smith, "that was just cheesy."
The man holding Everwood's creative cheddar is Greg Berlanti, a 30-year-old former exec producer of Dawson's Creek and the writer-director of 2000's gay romantic dramedy The Broken Hearts Club. Originally, Berlanti saw Everwood as a movie, but the more he noodled it over, the more he realized it would work better as a TV show, one that would blend the locate-rooted loopiness of Northern Exposure ( a fall Thaw Festival!), the topically of Picket Fences (surrogate pregnancy!) and the teen angst of My So Called Life (Ephram's chronic wet dreams!). "We ask people to go on a very emotional journey, though accompanied by humor," says Berlanti. "We want to create a balance between stuff that's not afraid to be sweet, and that's racy, edgy, and funny."
While The WB bought Berlanti's pitch in the summer of 2001, after Sept. 11 Everwood found itself on the fast track. "Here was a show about people leaving New York, about dealing with grief," says Berlanti, who produceswith partner Mickey Liddell (Go). "All these things, unfortunately, suddenly became very timely. There were definitely people in the business who were finding the script and passing it along to everybody they knew."
One of those people was Williams. "If I had turned back to the front page [of the script] and seen the words Written by Frank Capra, I wouldn't have been surprised," says the actor over lunch at a cafe near his rented home in Park City, Utah. Williams secured his role shortly after meeting with Berlanti and Liddell last fall. Smith, however, need a makeover before he could close the deal on Ephram.
"The note I got [from the producers] was that I wasn't the "WB type" " says Smith, a lean and wiry teen with slightly askew good looks. "I'm kind of a slob, I guess. My hair was all long and messed up, my face was all broken out, and I was wearing, like, a dirty T-shirt and ripped jeans. They gave me a hard time for that, so I had to clean up for the last audition."
Beyond styling secrets, it's difficult to tease future plot developments out of this bunch, which is probably for the best; Everwood has demonstated a tendency for twisty character revelations, like the recent episode where Delia's bullying buddy Magilla is revealed to have been born a hermaphrodite. (The gender politics of this story line are a bit lost on 9-year-old Cardone: "He's a boy and he plays with dolls secretly. First I see the bad side of him, but more I get to know him, I see the good side to him. So...well, that's it.")
Berlanti says he has a multiyear master plan for Everwood, including a juicy town secret being teased toward the end of the season. "I'd give you a cleaver hint that would be interesting but wouldn't give it away," says Berlanti, "but I'm not smart enough."
BACK ON THE SET, IN BETWEEN takes of cheesy tete-a-tete with Smith, Williams mulls the appeal of his hit show. "I think there's a yearning for places that are clean, pure, innocent," he says. "I know I feel that. And I think that's what people see in Everwood." Later, Smith offers his own, slightly less Our Town-ish thoughts on the drama's success. "I remember after the pilot aired, all my friends called me," says Smith "I had worked really hard on that show. Had a big fight scene at school, had these intense arguments
with Treat. But all they could say is, "Ha ha. Nice wet dream, Greg!" That's all my friends took away from it."