Not to be cynical, but no show on TV could have an easier time coming up with a season-ending cliffhanger than CHASING LIFE, a YA soap whose heroine is battling leukemia. For most of the back half of the series’ first season, April’s (Italia Ricci) cancer had been in remission, which left the show as a fairly ordinary romantic dramedy in which April dithered between hunks Dominic (Richard Brancatisano) and Leo (Scott Michael Foster), while attempting to build her career as a Boston newspaper reporter. But when season finale time came calling, there was no doubt what card the series would play: cue the cancer!
This winter portion of the Chasing Life season has been easier to take than the first half, mostly because April, her mother Sara (Mary Page Keller) and bestie Beth (Aisha Dee) stopped acting quite so much like the idiots they had been when April was first diagnosed. The show settled in to concentrate on their bubbly, if unresolved, love lives, along with that of April’s bisexual teen sister Brenna (Haley Ramm). The major development in these episodes was the decision to build April’s slightly more street-smart illegitimate half-sister Natalie (Jessica Meraz) into a full member of the ensemble, moving her from Florida to Boston so that she could be April’s rival for Dominic’s affections. The end of the season’s penultimate episode, however, contained the news that April’s remission had ended.
The season finale, written by showrunner Patrick Sean Smith and directed by Wendey Stanzler, was–with the exception of a silly scene where April’s oncologist gave her a sledgehammer to break up a piece of drywall in order to express her anger, which felt like a Red Band Society outtake–Chasing Life at its most sober. Most of it took place on the day before April would return to the hospital to begin chemo again, which was also the day her newspaper was deciding whom to lay off due to continuing budget issues. (It was an example of how maladroit the show’s writing can be, though, that it was presented as a surprise that firing April on the day she disclosed that her cancer had returned might give her grounds for a lawsuit, as to which, duh–in the end, noble April resigned her job in favor of a co-worker rather than hold onto it through legal technicality.)
Since we already knew that Natalie had agreed to donate her bone marrow to April and was a match (and that the series has been renewed for a second season), there wasn’t a tremendous amount of suspense involved, but the episode did a nice job of tracing her efforts to live in one day the events she’d be missing (Brenna’s birthday, Thanksgiving dinner) while she was in the hospital. Meanwhile, since the show had previously established that Brenna’s bone marrow was not a match for her sister but that she was willing to donate to another needy patient, the hour made an effort to introduce the young athlete who’ll be her recipient–it’s not clear whether he’s someone we’ll be seeing again nest season. The supposedly heartpiercing ending to the season had Leo, himself a cancer survivor, impetuously proposing to April and her accepting.
That presumably means a Season 2 concerned with their upcoming nuptials and April’s surgery. If Chasing Life survives beyond next summer (although it’s been picked up, ABCFamily doesn’t seem to have specified just how many episodes that will mean, and the ratings have been borderline), it will face the challenge of keeping April’s health fragile enough to preserve the series concept, yet healthy enough to remain a mostly life affirming drama. It’s going to be an increasingly delicate balance, so with its appealing cast but less than sparkling writing, Chasing Life‘s prognosis is at best a guarded one.
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