Hell, now with cheerleaders! (Well, *more* cheerleaders...)

I generally try to avoid reviews of shows until after I've seen and assessed them for myself. I try to go in with an open, unbiased mind, so I eschew as many outside influences as possible. Given my daily travels online, this isn't easy, but I generally manage to hold off until after I've screened it for myself. Indeed, on various occasions, I'll give a show a horrible or rave review, then stumble across someone else's review and I'm tempted to revise mine. I never do, but when other critics have a response to a program that is diametrically opposed to my own, I start to second-guess myself. Seriously, having been fairly unimpressed by the pilot of Life Unexpected (and then utterly disillusioned by the subsequent episodes), I kept coming across glowing reviews and started to wonder if maybe I'd been too harsh on the show or if there was something awesome about it that I was simply missing. I was tempted to water-down my criticisms, but ultimately didn't. Looking back on things, I'm glad I stuck to my guns.

Why does any of this matter, you ask? I present to you, Hellcats. Okay, based on the clips and previews I'd seen, I wasn't even going to screen the pilot. As such, when I happened by a headline for a glowing review of the show, I was unduly curious. I didn't read the whole review, but it was from a reasonably decent source (an entertainment mag of some sort), and had shockingly good things to say about this ostensible mess. Curiosity piqued, I decided I simply had to watch the pilot to see if maybe there was a surprise winner hidden beneath layer upon layer of hairspray and Ashley Tisdale. Also, I had heard rumor that Gale Harold (our dear friend Brian Kinney) was in the show. After shedding an embarrassed tear for his career, I gave in and screened the pilot.

It honestly wasn’t as bad as I expected, but it certainly wasn’t good either. For whatever reason, the two minute clip they decided to post online were two of the most painful minutes of the pilot. There were plenty of other painful moments, don’t get me wrong, but the powers that be somehow settled on the absolute worst ones to act as spokesmodel for the show. Good thinkin’, Superman (Tom Welling is an executive producer… for some reason).

All in all, it certainly wasn’t the worst pilot I’ve ever seen, but it definitely felt like the kind of show that ABC Family mulled over and decided to pass on. Believe me, that’s not an endorsement on several levels because this show constantly struck me as the kind of drivel that would be right at home among the ridiculous Make It Or Break It and the horrendous Secret Life of the American Teenager. I’ve never had much success with shows on ABC Family (or shows that would logically fit in with that crowd) so it’s little wonder that Hellcats didn’t work for me. But, if ABC Family has the kind of programming that’s your cup of tea, Hellcats might just be the new show you’ve been looking for.

There were a lot of problems with the pilot, but I’d say chief among them was the thick slathering of storylines that we’ve all seen 187 times before. Seriously, every single character, interpersonal dynamic, plotline, story arc set up, and one-off scene was painfully familiar. This show seems to have borrowed from just about everyone, threw in a few pom-poms and decided it had a new series on its hands. It wasn’t quite as substance-less as anticipated, but what substance it had was borrowed wholesale from somewhere else.

I could go into the specifics of the plot, but the quick and nasty summation involves recommending you re-watch Bring It On (original flavor) instead. Literally, the pilot was so similar that it actually got meta at one point where the lead actress actually watches Bring It On. I kid you not. On the one hand, I had to give them props for acknowledging the obvious and being brassy enough to lampshade this fact. On the other hand, the last thing this pilot needed was yet another reminder that we’ve seen this show before… only better. I realize that just about everything has been done in one way or another at this point, so even the most original show will have some familiar characters and storylines, but this show didn't even try to revinvent the wheel here.

To give a brass tacks account of the tropes we've all seen before... it's hard to even know where to begin.

• Rebellious/snarky (yet attractive) girl butts heads with the popular kids...
• ...only to join up with them out of necessity 15 minutes later.
• Low-key rebel and bubbly queen bee absolutely hate each other...
• ...but then become the best of friends.
• Oh, and they just so happen to be roomies! What a coincidence!
• Odd-couple hi-jinx ensue.
  
• Girls bond over personal anecdote surrounding a painful past
  
• Girl's best friend is a guy who's just a friend as far as she's concerned...
• ...only that it's abundantly obvious that he's totally in love with her and will be the long-term will-they-or-won't-they pairing on the show.
• Rebel girl promises her "bud, that's it" that she won't let the cool kids change who she is. Expect crises of conscience to follow.
  
• New guy shows up to run the joint and he had a past romantic relationship with one of his new colleagues (who is surprised, yet smitten).
• Love quadrangle leads the diva among them to use Blair Waldorf-style tactics to destroy opponent.
• Booze-hound parental figure that is both loved and loathed by industrious main character is an embarrassment.
  
• Primary group/glee club/business/(or in this case) cheerleading squad must perform well or they'll be shut down.
• Success rests on new girl's shoulders because she brings something new and special to the group.
• New girl doesn't fit in with the mean girls, so they steal her clothes while she's in the shower (okay, this is starting to get more specific than general, but seriously, we've seen this all before).
• Class tension based on financial concerns
  

I could go on and on, but I really tried not to commit too much of this pilot to memory.

I went in with such colossally low expectations that the fact that the pilot had basic elements like, you know, characters having names, won it points in my book. I found myself giving the show credit for things that no other show would receive credit for. Well, I'll be damned! Complete sentences! All the pity-points in the world still didn't win me over. At the very most, it could maybe turn into a guilty pleasure... for someone. Someone who's too young or too cave-dwelling to have seen all the shows and movies that spurred this series. I was bored and unimpressed and found myself fast-forwarding a fair bit here and there. It was so blatantly predictable that I really didn’t miss much. The thing that kills me is that if you’re going to be self-referential enough that you have your characters watch the movie you’ve copied, then these characters should be savvy enough about the genre (well, genres) they’re trapped in to see what’s coming as easily as the audience does. I was annoyed to an eye-rolling degree on many an occasion. If you’re going to get all meta and have your characters be genre savvy, I suggest you stay there, Show. It’s like the movie Scream. The characters knew what genre they were in, knew the mechanics of that particular universe, and worked within it. Here, the characters sporadically know what movie they’re in, but haven’t actually read the whole script. It was annoying.

This review is already far longer than this show warrants, and tells you basically nothing about the show itself (except that it's the latest sequel to Bring It On... which, actually, tells you everything you'll ever need to know), so I’ll just wrap things up. The show had enough depth and a solid enough set-up that it wasn’t a total disaster, but only just barely. It was a generic rehash of every teenage cliché you’ve ever seen, all rolled into one show about cheerleading. Yikes. Too boot, Brian Kinney wasn’t even in the pilot. I certainly won’t be giving this one another shot, but learned that a negative balance of expectations leads to watchable returns. It had more crackle and stability than you’d expect, but was still ultimately pretty vapid and hackneyed. I’ll pass, but I guess if I fell into the demographic this show is actually targeting, I might be more willing to give it a shot. Presumably, the tween set hasn't seen all the stuff that I've seen, so this must seem a lot more original to them than it does to little old 28-year-old me.

Pilot Grade: D+