The Burned Bridges of Ward, Nebraska

Microbiologist Becky Meer is part owner of a marginally successful fertility clinic in Ward, Nebr., a small town where everyone knows your business and snarky gossip is municipal entertainment. She’s a single mom to 10-year-old son Mitchell, and she stumbles through life in a drugged fog of stolen ADHD meds she doesn’t need, repeatedly making poor romantic decisions that result in embarrassing rug burns. And then an old flame, Kevin Holts, shows up in town, a millionaire software techie who thinks Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is the perfect teacher’s manual for his goofy experiment as an elementary school teacher. When Becky isn’t selling fertility services such as the IVF Deluxe Package and extolling the virtues of blastocyst banking and vasectomy reversal, she tries to save the clinic’s specialist, Dr. Thad, from his self-destructive philandering and alcoholism. Add in an unwashed lout trying to cash in on sperm-bank deposits, a disastrous school food drive that the kids boycott, a suddenly pregnant housewife who thinks she’s trapped the perfect father, and this debut is sure to elicit some laughs, although the story never really comes together. (Dec.)