I once fell in love at a party.
The room was crowded, the music was filling my head and as I glanced across the room....our eyes met and it felt like the entire universe shifted under me. It happens sometimes. You meet a person and it feels like you're coming home for the first time. I remember what that felt like, the way my heart pounded, the way I forgot to breathe when I was close to her. After all these years that joy is etched into my heart. And so is the pain I felt when I saw her one night with another guy.
It's not easy being in love. We fall for the wrong people, we give up our hearts and they get trampled. We do it because we're hoping to meet that one magical person. The one that we were meant to fit with. And that's what Relativity is all about.
Isabel (Kimberly Williams) is in Rome, trying to decide if she should marry the man everyone thinks is perfect for her. She can't quite commit to him and doesn't know why until she stumbles into Leo (David Conrad). Leo's everything she's not. He's an unfocused house painter with a family so troubled they might as well have "dysfunctional" tattooed on their chests. But from the moment they meet....there's something there.
Relativity is from the creators of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life and it captures perfectly the desperate, irrational joy of being in love. The show remembers what it's like to need someone even when it makes no sense, when it's the last thing you need in your life.
Isabel and Leo spend the week together in Rome and when they return home, they've convinced themselves that it was just a meaningless fling. But like most people in love, even when they can fool their brains, their hearts won't let them forget.
There are several stunningly sensual moments in the pilot. When they spend a day together in Rome, Leo takes Isabel's picture. And after he does, he lightly strokes her lip with his finger and it's as powerful an image as you'll ever see. And the scene of them kissing on the park bench shows such hunger and passion that it's breath-taking.
The producers made a couple of decisions which work wonderfully. The first is their choice to not rush the moment when Isabel and Leo are truly together again. Real life is complicated and the series acknowledges that by keeping them separated by all of the other things in their lives. The other important decision is that they make Carl, Isabel's fiance a likable, lovable person. By fighting the temptation to make him a hollow stick figure, they make Isabel's indecision seem all too believable.
How you react to Relativity depends a lot on how romantic of a person you are. For myself, at a time when television is filled with carping, unhappy marriages...it's nice to watch a couple fall in love.
Relativity airs on ABC Saturday Nights at 10PM Eastern.