Main cast: Linda Thorson (Jessica), Tom McDermott (Thomas), Dan Butler (David), and Mason Adams (The Doctor)
Director: Brian Thomas Jones

A New Woman was originally aired a week before Christmas, and for a good reason, as it is a retelling of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. With this show being what it is, though, expect some dubious decisions and choices.

Thomas is dying, a bad heart, and this is such a tragedy for his wife Jessica because it’s taking way too long for her to become a merry widow.

She has her eye on converting one particularly building of her husband, currently a homeless shelter, into a profitable office complex. Her plan is opposed by her husband’s nephew David, but she reminds him that once she is the boss of everything, she would evict him and his wife Carmen should he dare stand in her way.

Jessica is clearly the Scrooge here, and despite her scoffing about getting her own version of A Christmas Carol, she is visited by the usual ghosts and stuff.

What could have been a heartwarming tale, however, is ruined by this perplexing decision by the people behind this show to force Jessica to behave in the end or else. It was as if these people were too cynical to buy that a Scrooge could change just because of some Christmastime woo-woo shenanigans, so Jessica needs to be forced to behave.

Perhaps this may be a more realistic kind of ending, if we all would follow the same cynical route, but what’s the point of this story then? It’s not satisfying or heartwarming to see Jessica being forced to change, instead of coming to her own epiphany and deciding to change on her own free will.

Then there is David, supposedly the moral compass of the episode. However, it is just as easy to be cynical and realize that he has much to gain with the building being kept the way it is. Furthermore, he and his family have been leeching off Thomas’s goodwill all this while too, so his so-called moral arguments can also be seen as self serving ones.

It also doesn’t help that Dan Butler is so wooden as David that it’s hard to view that character as a human being, much less root for him.

All in all, this is an episode that seems tad confused as to what kind of show it wants to be.