Thanks to Choirmom for the transcript!

Gregory Smith Interview with WB11:

I: He's the big city boy who moves to a sleepy mountain town with his family in search of a new life, but with a new school, and new friends to make, life is not so easy in "Everwood".......
Clip from the upcoming episode, "The Miracle of Everwood:"

Colin: You can keep me in line, you can help me.

Ephram: Help you cover?

C: Would you get over this? The rest of the world already has.

E: Maybe if I knew you when you were still the Golden Boy I could ignore it too, but right now.....you scare me.

C: Ok, if that's the way you want it.

E: There's not much of a choice.


I: And Gregory Smith is with us this morning, welcome, thanks for coming in.....

GS: Thanks for having me.....

I: I know you don't get to New York very often, but we hear you're a big fan of the city so we decided to get you some things you can take home to, uh, Everwood.

GS: Awesome!

I: We got a little Yankees flag, an I love NY Bumper sticker, you can tape that to your forehead...

GS: Thank you! I'll put this on my car .... (laughs)

I: Sounds good. An I LOVE NY mug, WB11 Morning News hat,this will work out well....

GS: I feel like I won something!

I: You did! You won a free trip to the WB11 Morning News Studios. (continues...) a NY City shirt, a NY Mets hat (just in case you're a mets fan) and this beautiful thing ( a foam Statue of Liberty hat) if you're brave enough to put it on

GS: OH, perfect - this is my halloween costume next year....

I: Go ahead and put that on your head.....You don't want to???

GS: Right now? alright....

I: Put it on for us, put it on, other way, other way....

(Greg is putting it on correctly, SHE's messed up....)

I: Oh, no I'm wrong you had it right, I'm sorry ....I'm sorry (Laughs)

(GS puts it on for the camera)

I: There you go - you know that is such a good look.....SO cute.

GS: (Laughs thru this torture) You too!

(Interviewer then tries to put it on and yells "forget it" when she messes it up by putting it on the wrong way. Says it's Friday and calls herself a "spaz.")

I: Alright lets get to your little (?) story line about Amy, I know you have a crush on her that's a little bit scandolous, with the competing family. Is it fun to have a romantic love interest?

GS: Yeah, it's cool, I've never really.....I've done movies, I've done shows where there was a love interest - there was a girl that, well it's usually a girl that I'M in love with, except in the show its pretty much unrequited.....(laughs)...but, uh, this is cool because its like really important to the story, it really kind of drives our relationship, and its kind of fun to play.

I: Kissing scenes. Are you really nervous about it, or did you have prior experience?

GS: I think it doesn't really matter how much prior experience you have, you still get a little nervous because you don't want to make a fool of yourself.....But the first one we did in the pilot, I don't think I ate anything for 3 days before....I was afraid I'd have bad breath. (Laughs) I survived on water and altoids.

I: (Laughs) We all have those fears, even beyond the age of 20, right?

GS: Yeah - exactly.

I: Do you think the story line will move forward between you and Amy, or.....

GS: Yeah, if you ask ME, uh, I don't really know anything - the writers try to keep us in the dark so we don't tell anybody, but I think, yeah, the two characters are meant to be together in the end, so.....

I: Yeah, we hope so - I think we're hoping that will happen. Yesterday I played a bit of one-on-one basketball with your co-star Chris Pratt....who's a bit of a prankster.....

GS: Yeah, he's my roomate...

I: Listen to what he said about you....he says he has a little gossip:

Chris Pratt: One time I was playing basketball with Greg and he had these tear-away pants, these stripper pants that were sagging down, and he was running down the court and stepped on one of them (the legs) and ripped his entire pair of pants off and hit the deck and it was.....it was pretty funny.

I: Now, did he exaggerate, or did that really happen?

GS: Well, that happened, but that happened BEFORE I met Chris, so I don't know where he gets this from. I told the story a couple times....but he's stealing all my best material!

I: Oh, goodness - well you know what, we'll have to like get you here together - have a face off.....

GS: We'll sort it out -

I: ARE you a klutz, though?

GS: No, yeah, well its more like I make a fool of myself when I'm trying REALLY hard not to. I was down playing at this basketball park in LA, where everybody's like real tough, they're all like, "ballers" or whatever, and I play a little basketball, but I'm as Canadian as they come, and uh, so I made a little bit of a fool of myself.

I: Oh, well, we still love you anyway! Thank you so much for stopping by - PLEASE bring all this stuff back to Utah!
You can watch Everwood Monday nights at nine, etc.........

From Indystar.com

Marc D. Allan
'Everwood' has fresh episodes
Gregory Smith finds playing Ephram on 'Everwood' hard but rewarding.

April 20, 2003

Some people want to smack around Gregory Smith, who plays the generally unhappy teenage son Ephram Brown on the WB series "Everwood," and some want to bend his ear about how much the show has affected them.

But lately, the reaction Smith says he's received from most people is: When will we see some fresh episodes already?

The answer: Monday (9 p.m., WTTV ). Monday's episodes are repeated the following Sunday night at 6 p.m.

"I'm close to getting death threats about it," Smith, 19, joked by phone from Utah earlier this month during a break from taping the show's season finale. "But we shoot an episode in eight days and they air every seven. So they have this weird habit of just catching up to us."

"Everwood," the story of a brilliant, recently widowed neurosurgeon who moves his son and young daughter from New York City to small-town Colorado, feels like it's been in reruns for months. With the Sunday repeats of the previous Monday's episodes, viewers actually have seen more telecasts of repeat episodes than first runs.

But now, there are enough fresh episodes to take the show through the end of the TV season in mid-May.

It's been a solid first season for "Everwood," which has developed several emotionally gripping story lines. One is the relationship between Ephram and his father, played wonderfully by Treat Williams. Ephram is forever angry at his father for moving to Colorado and for being an absentee dad.

They've had memorable fights, with Ephram saying truly hurtful things -- like he wished his father had died instead of his mother. Adult fans of the show often comment about that, Smith said.

"I think it's awesome, from a selfish standpoint, just to be able to play such a part," he said. "There's so much there. There's so many layers and so many textures. The writers are constantly coming up with new stuff and keeping it interesting."

Yes, he acknowledged, people have a point when they tell him Ephram should quit whining. "But if you really think about it, especially at the beginning of the season, he was going through a lot. If you put it in perspective, he's got a right to be angry. That's changed throughout the season. He's come around a little bit. But you always have to leave somewhere to go."

Viewers also learned more about Ephram's anger in the most recent new episode, "The Unveiling," which used flashbacks to show the close relationship he had with his mother. "It justified a lot of his anger, I think," Smith said. "That was one of the more intense things I've done."

Fans of the show who are Smith's age tend to focus on the love triangle of Ephram, Amy (Emily VanCamp) and Colin (Mike Erwin). For the uninitiated, Colin and Amy were a couple. Colin got into a car accident and had been in a coma for several months. Ephram moved to town, and he and Amy started to get close. But then Ephram's father operated on Colin and saved his life.

In the coming weeks, that story will continue to develop, Smith said. He's hesitant to reveal details, but said he was surprised at some of the things he read.

That's good, right? It means we'll be surprised too.

"Hopefully," he said. "Hopefully. But maybe I'm just dumb."

Posted on Mon, Oct. 21, 2002
Leaving L.A. for family has benefits Move brings TV roles to actress's Utah door By R.D. Heldenfels The road to Hollywood sometimes passes through Utah. Touched by an Angel shoots there. So does the new WB drama Everwood. And it was the latter show that proved a help to Wadsworth native Nancy Everhard. Everhard's acting career has included guest shots on series such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Division and Charmed, as well as regular roles on the dramas Reasonable Doubts and The Untouchables. But at the age of 44, she found it was getting harder to find work. ``When a woman hits 40, her stock goes way down,'' she said in a recent telephone interview. ``I don't know why, but it's such a youth-oriented market. And I think I'm getting better in every way.'' Although she might have fudged her age, she quickly corrected an Internet reference that has her a couple of years younger. ``I'm not going to lie,'' she said, even if her work was hurt by it. ``I was always doing something,'' she said. ``Even when I was six months pregnant, I was working.... But it was not enough that I felt I was a working actress.'' That feeling and her son Ben, who turns 4 on Oct. 29, gave her plenty of reason to scale back her acting career. Although she felt a wrench about moving to Utah -- repeatedly saying how much she loved her Los Angeles home -- she was willing to go to keep close to her husband, actor Tom Amandes. He plays a doctor on Everwood. They met 10 years ago on The Untouchables, where Amandes played Eliot Ness and Everhard was Ness' wife. Asked if sparks flew right away, she said, ``Yeah.'' Pausing, she added happily, ``Yeah. Yeah.'' But somehow, in Utah, acting found her. Beginning tonight she will be seen on Everwood as Sharon Hart, the mother of comatose Colin Hart (Mike Erwin), whose condition has affected other characters on the show -- and may change soon. Everhard has done three episodes of the show and is getting ready for a fourth, but when pressed on Colin's future she said, ``I shouldn't tell.'' Instead, she talked about the acting opportunities that have sprung up, starting with a boost from Everwood executive producers Greg Berlanti and Mickey Liddell. ``Greg and Mickey kept saying, `We're going to find you something,' '' Everhard said. She has also done a Touched by an Angel episode, due to air around Thanksgiving, where the main guest star is singer Jo Dee Messina. And she is getting more calls from Hollywood proper. All that almost makes up for the uncertainty that accompanies any series these days, made greater by the uprooting required of cast and crew. Everwood, which airs at 9 p.m. Mondays on The WB, stars Treat Williams as a highly successful doctor who moves his family to a small Colorado town after the death of his wife. Thanks in part to a lead-in from 7th Heaven, it is drawing more than 6 million viewers a week. And a couple of weeks ago, The WB ordered a full season of 22 episodes. But Everhard and Amandes did not know that would happen when they began to make Utah plans. They kept their Los Angeles home, although a friend who had been a camera operator on The Untouchables is squatting there at the moment. Not knowing if the show would be in production after mid-November, they rented one place in a popular skiing area. Then they had to move before the skiers came in and the rates went up. ``They triple as of Dec. 1,'' Everhard said. Now they're renting another home in a local community that Everhard finds a good fit for Ben. As for the moving on, she said, ``We're used to the uncertainty. It's the nature of the business.'' But family matters can affect the business. Everhard recalled one long shooting day when Williams leaned over and said, ``You could be home with Ben right now.... '' ``The hardest thing is to do a scene with my husband,'' said Everhard, who had not acted with Amandes since The Untouchables ended in 1994. ``Dr. Abbott is very different from Tom,'' she said. And by most accounts Amandes is funnier and more pleasant than his Everwood character, who serves as Williams' foil. But Williams himself had a different view, Everhard said. ``They hung out a lot together in Canada (where the Everwood pilot was shot), and Treat said, ``He is SO Dr. Abbott.'' Fortunately, Everhard said Amandes is not bringing the part home with him. And life in Utah has been all right, especially in professional terms. ``I think I'm getting this work because I'm in Utah,'' she said. ``I'm a local.''

Sun., Oct. 6, 2002, 10:00pm PT

The WB picks up hot frosh 'Everwood'

Skein is first fall drama to receive 'back nine' order

By MICHAEL SCHNEIDER


The WB gave the citizens of "Everwood" something to cheer about on Friday. The frosh drama scored a full-season pickup.
That makes "Everwood," from Warner Bros. Television, the first fall drama on any network to receive a "back nine" episode order (ABC picked up two of its new sitcoms, "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" and "Life With Bonnie," last week). Like most new shows, WB initially greenlit 12 segs of "Everwood" in addition to the show's pilot.

"Everwood," along with returning shows such as "Smallville" and "7th Heaven," has helped the WB pull off one of its best-ever fall launches. During premiere week, the net was up 71% vs. last year in its target persons 12-34 demo and has experienced growth on a number of nights, including Mondays, where "Everwood" airs at 9 p.m.

"Everwood" has also posted the strongest lead-out ratings of any show behind WB Monday night stalwart "7th Heaven," now in its seventh season.

"We always believed in the show," said WB Entertainment president Jordan Levin. "It was the first pilot to get picked up this year. It was obvious to us creatively we were in a solid place, and the ratings and the critical response immediately confirmed that.

"It's a broad-based appeal show like '7th Heaven' that doesn't try to replicate ''7th Heaven,' nor does it go in a radically different direction," Levin added.

Levin and creator Greg Berlanti flew on Sunday to Utah, where "Everwood" is shot, to deliver the news to the show's cast and crew. Levin didn't even tell Berlanti of the pickup until moments before the plane left the Los Angeles airport; the exec producer thought he was simply traveling for a routine visit to the set.

"It's phenomenal," said Berlanti, just minutes after hearing the news.

"We've had the time of our lives. Everyone's going to be thrilled to keep working. Now we can continue to breathe life into these characters for the rest of the year."

Bucking trend

In a year in which most of the networks played it safe by scheduling "CSI"- and "Law & Order"-style procedural dramas, "Everwood" bucked that trend by attracting an audience with a family-oriented, serialized concept.

"Everwood" stars Treat Williams as a world-famous Manhattan brain surgeon who moves his teenage son (Gregory Smith) and pre-teen daughter (Vivien Cardone) to Colorado after his wife dies.

"I think we're being carefully observed by a lot of people to see how successful a family show can be in this day and age," Berlanti said. "This show couldn't have been developed any place else or been given the chance to live anywhere else."

Besides Berlanti, Mickey Liddell exec produces "Everwood."

After three weeks, "Everwood" has averaged a 3.1/8 rating in persons 12-34, a 2.7/7 in adults 18-34 and 6.4 million viewers overall.

'Timely idea'

"Everwood is a very special and very important show for all of us," said WBTV prexy Peter Roth. "Jordan, Carolyn (Bernstein), Maria (Grasso) and John Litvack have been so uniformly supportive of the show, and Greg Berlanti and (the other producers) have done an amazing job. The combination of this wonderfully timely idea with a beautiful script and great casting means the magic just unfolds.

"It's one of the more well-realized pilots and series that I've worked on."

Roth said he's particularly pleased the Frog moved so quickly to order the back-nine for "Everwood."

"It's always good to get the word early," he said. "It makes for great morale. It's an inspirational vote of confidence for the whole crew."

(Josef Adalian contributed to this report.)

The Abortion Issue Comes to 'Everwood'
Fri, May 2, 2003 06:23 PM PDT

by Kate O'Hare
Zap2it, TV News



LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - In the episode of The WB's family drama "Everwood" airing Monday, May 5, at 9 p.m. ET, the two doctors in the title hamlet in Colorado -- big-city liberal Andy Brown (Treat Williams) and small-town conservative Harold Abbott (Tom Amandes) -- find themselves on opposite sides of the issue of performing abortions.

But, says series creator Greg Berlanti, don't jump to conclusions about who believes what.

"The great thing we really strove to do in the episode was to say, 'This is a very idiosyncratic issue in terms of people's opinions about abortions.' Whatever their life experience is, that's what's going to inform their opinion, not necessarily where you believe they should be in the political spectrum."

"The writers all had very different opinions than you would have thought. That's the thing I kept coming back to, saying, 'Guys, this is how we need to tell our story. The fact of the matter is, we're sitting in a room here, and no one is coming down on this issue in a way I would expect. Let's find a way to dramatize that with our characters. Let's find a way to humanize just how particular this issue is for people.'"

"Maybe that, in and of itself, will be a step forward, both for the show and just for this subject matter. The reality is, not talking about this stuff, and people approaching it from both extremes, to me, is why we're not moving toward any kind of solution."

In "Episode 20," written by Berlanti and Vanessa Taylor, the father (Kevin Tighe) of 18-year-old Kate Morris (Kate Mara) sends her to Dr. Brown because she is pregnant by her piano teacher, Matt (Ian Voght), who has departed Colorado for London.

Brown counsels the girl to think about it and also asks Abbott for advice. At first, Abbott tells Brown to send Kate to a clinic in Denver, but when her father presses the issue, Brown finds himself in an unexpected moral dilemma. Urged by his nurse (Debra Mooney) to speak to Abbott again, Brown is in for yet another surprise at his colleague's reaction and the reasons behind it.

Although abortion is one of the most incendiary of hot-button issues, Berlanti feels it had to be discussed. "When you have upwards of a million teenage girls a year having an abortion, and it not being dramatized on television and not being reflected in the images that so many teenagers watch and see, it feels like a fallacy."

"It feels irresponsible to not be portraying that image. It's a procedure that's happening."

Also factoring into the story is Abbott's Roman Catholic faith, which he shares with Berlanti.

"Catholicism and the demands of it have been something that I've wanted to find a way to include this year," Berlanti says. "We really had to stay focused on the [Jewish] faith of the Browns this year ... but I think next year we'll get a bit more into the Abbotts' faith."

Asked how he thinks fellow Catholics will react to the episode, Berlanti says, "I hope fellow Catholics, and I hope people of all faiths, appreciate the fact that the show is willing to say, 'All we went to do is dramatize the fact that this procedure happens, and we don't want to shy away from the truth here, and let people make their own choices at the end of the episode.'"

Also in the May 5 episode, teen Colin (Mike Erwin) suffers a severe setback in his recovery from a head-injury-induced coma, which began after Brown performed near-miraculous surgery.

Unfortunately, nausea and violent outbursts have marred Colin's recovery. Now, Colin and Brown face a terrifying choice, which plays itself out over the season's last two episodes, "Fear Itself," airing May 12, and "Home," airing May 19.

"Doctor Brown is going to have to go back in," Berlanti says. "To do that would put Colin's life at risk, so in the finale, you see him traveling to his mentor, played beautifully by Philip Baker Hall. He's always gone to him before any big cases and asked him whether or not he should do it, sort of like the oracle at Delphi."

"So Andy goes to him and ... you'll have to wait and see what happens."

From The New York Times:

A risky topic on 'Everwood'

By STEPHEN BATTAGLIO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

More than a million abortions are performed each year in the United States, yet it's rare for a character on a prime-time TV show to have one.


It happens next Monday on "Everwood," the WB drama series that stars Treat Williams as Dr. Andrew Brown, a neurosurgeon who gives up his career in New York to practice medicine in a small Colorado town.


In the episode, a pregnant teenager is sent to Brown for advice and ultimately has an abortion, performed by another doctor.


The intense debate over abortion is the reason advertisers have typically stayed away from programs tackling the issue.


"It's not a verboten subject," said TV historian Tim Brooks, who heads research at Lifetime. "But it's one that tends to be avoided. The protests you get will be loud and some of them go to the advertisers, and they don't like that."


Consider this:


When Bea Arthur's character on the '70s CBS sitcom "Maude" had an abortion, the episode ran commercial-free and didn't air on some of the network's affiliates.


An 1980s NBC movie about the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade aired once with some advertising but was never repeated.


NBC also saw advertisers pull out of a "Law & Order" episode about the bombing of an abortion clinic.


The "Everwood" episode is likely to have problems, too. "Every advertiser has criteria of where they want their commercials to run," said Stacey Lynn Koerner, executive vice president for ad-buying firm Initiative Media. "It will have more advertisers pulling out than usual."


Jordan Levin, entertainment president for WB, said his network is aware of the financial risk involved in the episode but believes it's worth taking.


"We're hopeful that when [advertising] people see the episode, they'll see the balanced point of view and the quality of the show and say, 'I'm going to support the program,'" Levin told the Daily News.


Greg Berlanti, creator of "Everwood," told WB early on that abortion needed to be addressed on a series where most of the stories focus on teenagers in a rural community.


"It's a procedure that happens, and it happens in small towns," Berlanti told The News. "What does it mean for the people involved? What does it mean to the doctors?"


Although "Everwood" is regarded as a family show, it has ventured into controversial subjects such as the medical use of marijuana, high-school students with sexually transmitted diseases, and hermaphroditism. Berlanti believes scripted programs need to deal with controversial subjects in order to compete for viewers now captivated by reality shows.


"We hear about [such topics] in the news and we read about them in the paper," he said, "and we don't deal with them."