The Way Home
The Way Home is a fascinating and imo largely excellent TV series. Three seasons have aired; a fourth has been approved but isn’t out yet.
The show manages to be all of the following:
- A Hallmark show.
- A time travel show.
- A romance (for multiple different couples).
- A multi-generational family drama, featuring both blood family and found family.
- A tearjerker, with some very sad and traumatic situations.
- A Canadian show.
- A grandmother/mother/daughter show. (I feel like it has Gilmore Girls and Jane the Virgin somewhere in its DNA, though it’s not much like either of those shows in most ways.)
- A show about healing from old emotional wounds and traumas.
…and more. Every time I think I’ve got its genre pinned down, the show goes somewhere I didn’t expect. But I really like most of those unexpected directions.
The show used to be available for streaming on Peacock, but that availability recently ended; as far as I know, the least expensive way to view it now is to sign up for a Hallmark+ subscription (~$8/month) and watch all 30 episodes in a month or two. You can also rent or buy episodes on other platforms, but they’re much more expensive that way.
(The rest of this post doesn’t include specific spoilers as such, but does include some general notes about some things that happen in the show, so if you don’t want to know more, stop reading here.)
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The characters are mostly white and cis and straight, but the show is one of those works that’s set in a world in which there’s no discrimination. For example, one of the three leads is of partial South Asian descent (both the character and the actor), and at least three recurring characters are Black, but race is never mentioned on the show. At least two characters are overtly lesbian, and everyone is completely matter-of-fact about that; nobody is even surprised. One character is explicitly non-binary, and again, everyone takes that completely in stride.
(My take on that kind of thing is that I feel that there’s a place for both aspirational world-without-discrimination fiction and realistic portrayals of discrimination in fiction. But I also feel like there’s a fine line between a no-discrimination setting and cultural homogeneity; I think in the whole first three seasons of this show, there are only one or two moments when the characters of color give any indication of having a cultural or experiential background that’s at all unlike that of the white people around them.)
The main three leads are Chyler Leigh (who I had previously known as Kara’s awesome queer sister Alex in Supergirl, but whose character is (at least mostly) straight in this show), Sadie Laflamme-Snow (who I was previously unaware of, but who I like a lot in this), and Andie MacDowell (who I don’t like as much in this as in some other things I’ve seen her in). But it’s a pretty ensemble-y kind of show; there are a dozen other actors who also play very prominent roles.
I felt like Leigh and MacDowell were a little stiff/awkward for the first few episodes of the series, but I feel like they settled into their roles more as the show went on. And more generally, I’ve largely liked the show more and more as it’s gone on.
I do occasionally get annoyed at the writers (as I probably do with all TV series). For example, I know that it’s a genre convention in grandmother/mother/daughter shows for each character to go through a succession of romantic partners; but as usual in such shows, I find some of the second- or third-round romantic partners here annoying, and I don’t see what the leads see in those characters.
And there’s a really traumatic event in season 2 that I was pretty upset by because I didn’t think it was plausible for the characters to bounce back, emotionally, as quickly and easily as they seemed to be doing. (But this issue gets picked up again later.)
And there are occasional plot developments that seem forced to me.
But overall, I like the show a lot. And I felt like the end of season 3 did a good job of providing closure for several of the ongoing storylines while also providing hooks for season 4.
Anyway, I recommend it, especially if you like time-travel shows and romance shows and family-bonding shows.