Hand me a tissue

Lately I've been using the miracle of DVD technology to catch up with one of my guiltiest pleasures of the 1990s, the Fox series "Party of Five." That, you may recall, was the deliciously overwrought family drama about five San Francisco siblings orphaned when their folks die in a car crash.

Then as now, my appreciation for "Party of Five" is part camp, part not. The dramatic lighting and folky incidental music are self-parodic, but the characters -- flawed, desperate, grieving -- are memorable. So is the writing: in the episode we watched last night, a minor character had a line that was perfectly lovely, something like, "You make love with your fingers crossed behind your back." That's an image that is absurd and crazy and informed by the kind of bitterness that, indeed, finds its purest expression in the evening soap operas. Lines like that make "Party of Five" a treat.

For some reason, I never could abide most hour-long television dramas. Cop shows, lawyer shows, doctor shows, politician shows -- all are suffocatingly dull to me. But one genre is the exception: Hour-long family dramas, like "Family," "Eight Is Enough," "Little House on the Prairie," "Our House." Endlessly fascinating to yours truly. I was a big fan of Geena Davis' ill-starred political drama "Commander in Chief," mostly because it had strong family-drama elements.

And I'm also a fan of "Party of Five." A++++++++