SULLIVAN’S CROSSING: Episode 3.1

Here's the honest read: Sullivan's Crossing opens its third season with real emotional material — a mother grieving a miscarriage, a father resisting the changes coming to his family's outpost — but the writing doesn't do that grief justice. Dialogue repeats itself almost word for word between characters, and the acting suffers for it. The flashbacks to Maggie's loss land hard; almost everything else feels flat.

The caution here isn't really about violence or language — there's very little of either. It's about three escalating kissing scenes, one of which has a character strip down to her bra to seduce her boyfriend at work, interrupted before it goes further. Layer that onto a worldview where every character solves grief and conflict through sheer personal willpower rather than turning outward for help, and you have a show that's emotionally earnest but spiritually thin.

Teens and young adults who can watch critically, and talk about what's missing, will get something out of this. Families wanting to screen first should wait and see.

Maggie once had a promising career as a neurosurgeon. Now she's rebuilding her life at her father Sully's family outpost, still reeling from a miscarriage she suffered after Sully nearly died in a diner fire. Her boyfriend Cal wants back in, but Maggie keeps him at arm's length. Meanwhile Sully bristles as their business partner Edna modernizes the outpost he built, and fireman Rafe's girlfriend Syd competes for his attention against his growing duties at the firehouse. Everyone in Sullivan's Crossing is trying to move forward. Not everyone knows how.

Two stars means this episode has real moments buried in a lot of dead air. The most convincing scenes are the flashbacks of Maggie processing her loss — genuine, aching, well-played. Everything around them struggles. The dialogue is repetitive to a fault; one early exchange between Maggie and Cal recycles the same two flat sentences about lunch plans, and it's representative of the writing throughout. That thinness drags the performances down with it, since actors can only do so much with lines this bland.

Sullivan's Crossing clearly wants to be a show about relationships tested by hardship. The grief material shows it can get there. The rest of the episode, though, is coasting — competent but forgettable television that needed sharper writing to earn its emotional ambitions.

Sullivan's Crossing wants you to believe in community. The outpost is built on neighbors checking in on each other, a girlfriend cooking a partner's favorite meal after a hard day, friends showing up for friends. That instinct is good, and it echoes something true: we were made to bear one another's burdens.

But look closer at how the show resolves pain, and the worldview underneath shows itself. When Maggie faces her grief, or Sully faces change, the show's answer is always the same: dig deep, find your willpower, figure it out yourself. Comfort from friends and family is present as scenery, but it's not where healing actually comes from in this story. A "Creator" gets a passing mention from one couple, but faith never becomes a real resource for anyone carrying real pain. That's humanism with a friendly face.

Scripture tells a different story about grief. It doesn't ask us to grieve alone or to muscle through by sheer resolve. "The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit" (Psalm 34:18). Maggie's loss is real, and the show is right to sit with it seriously. But the healing it offers her comes from inside herself, when the deeper comfort — the kind that actually reaches broken places — comes from outside us, from God.

Sullivan's Crossing opens season three with grief worth taking seriously and writing that doesn't rise to meet it, plus a few scenes that push past what most families want on screen. That's why our answer is wait and see. If you'd rather start family movie night with something safer, check out our latest family-friendly picks.