Several months ago I downloaded the series premiere of Hart of Dixie for free on iTunes, but I never got around to watching it until a few days ago. Needless to say, I instantly fell in love with it so I bought a season pass for the show on iTunes, and I’ve decided to start blogging about it.
Anyway, I thought that the pilot did a really great job of establishing what the show is about and introducing all of the characters. The episode began with the main character, Zoe, riding on a bus to Bluebell, Alabama. Through narration, Zoe explains how she ended up taking a job as a general practitioner at a small town doctor’s office. Zoe says that she graduated at the top of her class at medical school, and it’s her dream to become a cardiothoracic surgeon like her father is and be a doctor in New York City. An old man named Dr. Harley Wilkes approached her at her graduation and told her that he was really impressed by her speech. He also offered her a job at his doctor’s office in Alabama, but she rudely turns him down, telling him that she wants to be a cardiothoracic surgeon. Zoe is confused why the man would offer her a job when he doesn’t even know her. She just figures he offered her a job at his practice because he really liked her speech, but she’s still confused why he keeps sending her postcards over the years, telling her that the offer still stands, but she just ignored them over the years.
Of course things don’t go the way she planned, otherwise she wouldn’t have taken the job in Alabama. Her boyfriend dumped her basically because she liked talking about surgery more than she liked talking about his day. She also gets turned down for a fellowship in a cardiothoracic surgery program that she wanted, because the doctor in charge of the program told her that she basically has bad bedside manner and treats the patients more like a puzzle to solve than a person. Hearing him say that immediately made me think of House on House and the way he treats his patients. Unable to get a job anywhere else, she leaves a message on Harley’s answering machine telling him that “he wins” and that she’s on her way to Alabama.
I have to say that I didn’t really like Zoe very much for about the first half of the episode because she’s pretty rude to everyone in Bluebell that tries to help her and acts like she’s better than everyone in the town. She also says she just wants to practice medicine there for the one year that she’s required to practice general medicine and than leave as soon as the year is over. Also, she doesn’t make a very good impression with the people in town, because of her snobby attitude, and I don’t blame them for not liking her at first.
I didn’t really like her until she becomes concerned about some dark spots on the face of a girl named Mabel that comes to her doctor’s office in Alabama with her mom who’s there to get stitches on her hand. The spots on the girl’s face were due to the fact that she’s pregnant, but Mabel didn’t even know for sure that she had gotten pregnant after hooking up with a guy who apparently told her that he would only sleep with her if she didn’t make him where a condom. I don’t blame the girl for being afraid to tell people that she was pregnant, because her mom treats her bad enough as it is, giving her a hard time about her being overweight. Anyway, I digress.
Once Zoe got off the bus several miles outside of Bluebell, she starts walking to the town until a guy named George Tucker who’s driving down the road in his truck stops and offers her a ride. She accuses him of being an ax murderer, but he tells that he’s a lawyer and that he used to live in New York City too, but he likes living in Bluebell better, because the people there are all very nice and willing to help people when they need help with something. There was definitely instant chemistry between George and Zoe, and they run into each other frequently throughout the episode. I can definitely see them dating down the road. Unfortunately, it’s revealed later on in the pilot that George is engaged to a girl named Lemon, the daughter of the doctor that owns the other half of Harley’s practice. Lemon’s father, Brick, wasn’t happy at all about the prospect of having to share the practice with Zoe.
I have several things to say about Lemon. First off, I think she’s an even bigger bitch than Zoe was at first, and that’s saying something. Secondly, what kind of name is Lemon? Lemon is the name of a fruit, not a person. Also, I can’t believe that she was more concerned about how George would look in the pictures at their engagement party with his arm in a sling than she was about his safety and the fact that he didn’t get injured worse. At least Lemon apologized to George for acting like a bitch and said that she would try harder to be the person that he fell in love with. It also sounds like she has a history with the mayor of the town Levon Hayes, because they had a rather cryptic conversation at hers’ and George’s engagement party. I’m anxious to learn more about that.
As soon as she gets to Harley’s doctor’s office she learns that he died four months ago and that Harley had told his secretary, Emmeline “Mrs. H” Hattenbarger who’s played by Nancy Travis to keep sending Zoe the post cards after he died, because he knew that she would accept his offer one day. When Harley died, Zoe left his half of the practice that he worked at.
Harley’s secretary arranged for Zoe to stay on the mayor’s planation, which Zoe mocked until she discovered that Levon Hayes, who was a former football player that she was a fan of was the mayor of Bluebell. He was one of the few people that she was truly nice to right away.
One thing that I really liked about the pilot was the culture shock that Zoe experienced going from living in New York City to living in a small town in Alabama. She assumed that they would have a Starbucks in town, but they didn’t, and she didn’t know that the “catch of the day” for the fish at the grocery store was fried fish. Zoe also wasn’t accustomed to living in a place where the fuse box could overload and blow the electricity out if she ran certain appliances at the same time, which Levon warned her about. Her neighbor, Wade, who looks over the plantation, blew out the fuse box, which is what led to them meeting each other for the first time. He was throwing a party and running a bunch of different things at the same time like Levon warned her not to do. Wade is definitely a bit of a bad boy, and I think that Wilson Bethel plays the role perfectly. I can also see Zoe and Wade becoming a couple eventually, especially since they did make out and almost have sex in Wade’s car after everyone had gotten mad at her for the whole incident with Old Man Jackson hitting George with her car. I think they have good chemistry.
Levon had told Zoe to “watch out for Burt Reynolds”, and it tuned out that he was referring to an alligator named Burt Reynolds. Suffice to say, Zoe ended up running into Burt Reynolds while was walking in the woods after making out with Wade, and she freaked out when she saw him. This led to yet another one of George and Zoe’s many run-ins in the episode, because George ended up saving Zoe from Burt, because he had been running through the woods at the time when he ran into her that time.
Zoe’s mother who had apparently always disapproved of Zoe’s aspirations of being a heart surgeon was against the idea of her working at Harley’s practice for a year. Zoe ended up signing a form for Old Man Jackson, which would allow the DMV to renew his driver’s license, because she was distracted due to the fact that she was arguing with her mother on the phone while he was taking the vision test. It turns out that everyone in town, but her knew that he had been declared legally blind and had simply memorized the eye chart. Zoe didn’t learn this until Old Man Jackson hit George with his car, which is what led to his shoulder being dislocated and therefore having to keep his arm in a sling. The accident with Old Man Jackson made people dislike Zoe even more than they already did. I know that Zoe didn’t know that Old Man Jackson was legally blind, but I don’t think she should have signed his form without paying attention to what he was doing when he was reading the eye chart, or at least pretending to. That has got to be against some sort of ethics code for practicing medicine or something. I’m wondering if it would have been grounds for George to sue her for malpractice, negligence or something else.
After all the disastrous incidents that she had with the people in town, her mother showed up to convince her to go back to New York, Zoe decides that practicing medicine in Bluebell isn’t a good fit for her and she should move back to New York and find a job somewhere else. Zoe was getting ready to take a plane back to New York when she gets a call from Mabel who was working as a cater waitress at George and Lemon’s engagement party, saying that she’s having stomach pain. Zoe had trouble getting into the party since she didn’t have an invitation until Levon showed up and got her in by saying that Zoe was his plus one. It turned out that the stomach pain that Mabel was having were actually contractions and she was in labor. Brick, the doctor who co-owns the practice tried to take over and deliver the baby, but Mabel told him that Zoe was her doctor, not him. There wasn’t time for them to get Mabel to a hospital so Zoe had to deliver the baby there. There was a minor complication during the delivery, but both Mabel and her baby girl ended up being just fine.
Of course Mabel’s mother was upset with Mabel for getting pregnant and not even realizing it, but Zoe stood up for Mabel, which led Mabel to tell her mother off and that she was going to raise her daughter and teach her how to feel good about herself. I was really proud of Mabel for standing up to her mother, because I think her mother is a major bitch when it comes to how she treats Mabel. As for how I feel about the whole thing with Mabel getting pregnant and not knowing it, she seems like she would be a good candidate to be on the TV show I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.
After Zoe was done with Mabel, Emmeline told her that she did a good job with Mabel. She went on to reluctantly tell Zoe that Harley was her father and showed her a picture of her as a baby with Harley, which was why he left her his half of the practice when he died. Zoe confronted her mother about this and her mother explained that she got pregnant with her after she had hooked up with Harley on a cruise, because she apparently had a fantasy about having a fling with an older man. Her mother didn’t know for sure that Harley was Zoe’s father until she broke her arm as a kid and they tested the man that Zoe believed was her father to see if his blood type was compatible with hers’ in case she needed a blood transfusion, and it wasn’t, therefore determining that Harley was Zoe’s biological father.
Apparently, he couldn’t handle Zoe not being his biological daughter, which led to her parents getting a divorce. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about Harley being her dad. On the one hand, I’m glad that he’s her father, because he would have seemed like a complete lunatic to leave his half of the practice that he ran with Brick to a complete stranger. That’s basically exactly how Brick and everyone in town feels about the whole situation since they don’t know yet that Zoe is Harley’s daughter. On the other hand, I don’t like how they explained Zoe’s mother and father finding out that Harley is her father. The whole thing about them finding out after Zoe broke her arm and they tested their blood types with hers’ seems very contrived and too much like a soap opera. Don’t get me wrong, I love soap operas, but having that be the way they learned that Harley was Zoe’s father doesn’t really fit with the overall tone of the show, which feels fairly lighthearted despite the fact that it’s also a drama.
I have to say that I’m very surprised by how much Zoe idolizes the man she grew up believing was her father, because it sounds like he was basically an absentee father for most of Zoe’s life. Although, after Emmeline told her that Harley was actually her father and Zoe’s mother told her that he couldn’t handle the fact that Zoe wasn’t his biological daughter, it kind of made sense why he wasn’t around when Zoe was growing up. Although, Michael Ausiello just announced yesterday on his website that Gary Cole has been cast as her absentee father, so we know that he’ll be showing up in Bluebell later this season.
Zoe ended up deciding to stay in Bluebell after all since Harley wanted her to work at his practice and she realized that she could learn a lot from him even though he’s dead now. Even though this is the only episode of the show that I’ve seen at this point, if I had to guess how the season is going to end, she’ll have finished her one year of working as a general practitioner and will have received a job offer to work as a cardiothoracic surgeon in New York City. She’ll be forced to decide between taking a job in New York City or staying in Bluebell and continuing to work there. That’s assuming the timespan for the entire first season equates to one year. If that’s how the writers end the first season, Zoe will of course decide to stay in Bluebell, because the whole thing with George and Lavon having lived in New York only to decide that they prefer living in a small town seems to be a major theme with the two of them. Besides, if Zoe were to decide to go back to New York, the show would only be able to last a year and the whole show would all seem pointless.
I’m interested to see how they write Emmeline out of the show since Nancy Travis ended up continuing her role on Last Man Standing, which I’m assuming was the show that she had committed to first in the event that Hart of Dixie and Last Man Standing both got picked up to go to series, which in indeed ended up happening.
All in all, I have to say that I loved the series premiere for the most part. I think that the overall tone of Hart of Dixie and the show being set in a small town where everybody knows each other is very reminiscent of Gilmore Girls, which is one of my favorite TV shows. I love almost all of the characters, and I think the show has some great writing. My only two complaints that I have about the series premiere was how stuck up Zoe acted at first. I think the writers were taking a big risk by writing Zoe the way that they did for the first half of the episode. Also, like I said, I don’t really like how they handled Zoe’s mom and dad learning that Harley was her biological father. Despite those two issues that I have with the series premiere, I really do think that Hart of Dixie is a great show, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
All that being said, I give this episode a rating of a B+.
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