Summary

This gentle rural sitcom, Evening Shade, starred Burt Reynolds as Wood Newton, an ex-pro football star who returned to his Arkansas home town of Evening Shade to coach the high school football team (the Mules), which had not won a game for two years. His wife Ava was elected the town's prosecuting attorney while pregnant with the couple's fourth child. Although their eldest son Taylor was the team quarterback, he inherited little of his father's sporting prowess. Assisting Wood is Herman Stiles, a fragile mathematics teacher uncommonly unsuited to the task of football coaching. Other regulars included cantankerous Dr Elldridge and Ava's father Evan, who disapproves of Wood's laid-back lifestyle and who has never forgiven him for stealing his daughter away at such a young age. (Ava was 18 when she got hitched to the 30-year-old Wood.) The series was narrated by Ossie Davis as Ponder Blue, the laconic and philosophical proprietor of Ponder Blue's Barbecue Villa, around which much of