The CW's revamped (god, I wish there had been vampires), retooled (emphasis on "tool"), and reinvented (ya know, like the wheel, but with bad writing) version of the 90's phenomenon premiered tonight and managed to defy Bart's knowlege of physics by both sucking and blowing. It was bad, folks. Even worse than I had feared. It's this kind of crap that makes it so damn hard to argue with
Ammon's elitist "Oh, I don't watch television" argument. It also makes his delivery of the word "television" (as though it's a pejorative) that much more reasonable. It was decidedly not good. It was so bad it was bad. (As opposed to my beloved Gossip Girl that's so bad is FABULOUS!).I'm guessing Flavia is the only person who actually watched it, and F, try as I might to enjoy even a single solitary moment, I just couldn't! It sucked too much! :( It was so bad it didn't even fall into guilty pleasure territory... Let me count the ways...
(1) The premiere was 2 hours long (because extra length was obviously the missing ingredient in making it good) and yet they still couldn't fit any substantive storyline or exposition into the plot in a meaningful, non-painful way. The first 10 minutes of the show was so anvilicious I could have cried. I kept thinking of that line from The Great Muppet Caper when after a long, random, seemingly out-of-place pile of information is delivered, the character says, "It's plot exposition. It has to go somewhere." That was pretty much the crux of the show tonight. The opening sequence went a little something like this:
Teenage dingbat: "Dad, it's such a bummer that we have to move to Beverly Hills from our quaint, small town in Kansas, where I left my boyfriend, Jason. I also had to leave the school play where my talents as an actress and singer were formerly showcased. My blood type is A negative and I am alergic to butterscotch and imitation butterscotch."
Dad who's too good looking and young to be her actual father: "I know it's hard, my daughter who is currently 15, but your grandmother (my mother), Tabitha, needs us, so we're moving back to my home town to try to keep her drinking problem under control, which came as a result of working in showbiz for so many years. I got a job as the principal at West Beverly High School, my alma mater which was founded in 1927, where you and your adopted brother Dixon will be going to school."
It was painful to watch. The dialogue was bad to begin with, but compound that with the insanely bad acting and it was positively pestilent. They could have woven all 800 of those details into a cohesive narrative, but that would take, like, totally way too much time. And like, effort... and stuff.
(2) They decided to throw about 800 characters into the show, none of which does the audience care about even a tiny bit. There was no build-up for anyone (aside from clunky plot exposition), no quiet moments to let the audience feel like they knew who these characters were, no endearing qualities presented, no intriguing aspects of self to be explored, and no acting ability to carry it off. It was patently devoid of depth and it just made me not care about anyone and by extension, the random events that were happening to them. I spent half the pilot trying to remember which stick figure was cu
rrently on the screen.(3) Which brings me to my next grievance. There may be no such thing as being too rich, but there is certainly such thing as being too thin!!! (And I used exclamation points there to give you a visual reference for what these girls would look like lined-up.) Oh wow, the main girl, Annie (it's a shame such a fine name had to be degraded by inclusion in this show) and some girl named Silver (yeah, I know) made the Olsen twins look positively husky. You could have sliced cheese on their collar bones. At one point, Lollipop Head pats Victoria Beckham's Skinnier Cousin on the shoulder and I was sure she had cut her hand clean off. Those girls need sandwiches. Stat.
(4) In a shameless effort at attracting an audience that wasn't completely comprised of junior high school students, the show brought back Kelly and Brenda and Nat (oh my!). It forced me to not only have to keep straight who was related to whom and how with the new cast of characters, but I had to dig out what few memories I have of the old show to remember how all of them were related. Apparently Brandon and Kelly had a son together? Or something? And Kelly is somehow Silver's sister? And Silver is David Silver's... neice? step aunt? cousin-in-law? I didn't care enough to figure it all out, but it was annoying nonetheless. Honestly, when it's possible to keep Julie Cooper Nichol Cooper Roberts Cooper straight in my head, I would have thought nothing could stump me. Having to sort out the Cohens, the Coopers, and the Nicholses on The O.C. should have prepared me better for this show... I believe at one point Marissa was her own cousin... Still didn't help. Oh, how I loved vintage O.C.
(5) I've never seen so much storyline crammed into 2 hours... and I watched The O.C.! It was shocking peeps. Let me just take the main girl, Annie, and give a brief rundown of all that happened to her in the span of roughly two episodes. She moved from Kansas to California where she had to make all new friends. She catches a guy she kind of knows cheating on his girlfriend, Naomi, who eventually becomes of her good friends... or so she thinks. Naomi uses one of Annie's old essays as her own, they both get caught and all hell breaks loose. At Naomi's sweet 16 party (which Annie had to sneak out of the house in order to attend, after having been grounded), the truth about her boyfriend comes out and Annie goes around aplogizing to everyone for it. Oh, Annie also makes an enemy out of Silver who posts some nasty things about her on a blog. She and Silver become friends after the whole Naomi thing went down because apparently Silver hates Naomi a lot or something. Naomi helps Annie win a role in the school musical and tells Annie all about her tortured past. Annie breaks up with her boyfriend from Kansas, hooks up with some guy from drama, goes with him to San Fran on his private jet, and gets in trouble for lying about the whole thing when her mom finds something San Fran-esque in her pocket. Also, while she's gone, her grandmother gets in a car accident, and Annie feels all terrible or whatever. She and Naomi's ex, Ethan, have a heart-to-heart about old times and he decides he likes her. Ethan goes over to Annie's house, but finds her making out with San Fran on the porch. That's all I remember, and that's the Cliffs Notes version, BELIEVE ME, so wow...
If that's what happened in the pilot, I have to assume she'll be a top-secret government operative/magician/Libyan arms dealer by the end of the season. That's really the most logical course of events, as near as I can tell.
Oh, there are so many more grivances I could air, but I don't care enough about the show to bother. In general, I don't judge pilots very harshly. After most, I'm intrigued enough to at least give the series a few more episodes to wow me. With 90210... Yeahhh... not so much.
It's kind of a relief not to have to add this steaming pile of unfortunate career moves to my must-watch list, because lord knows, it's pretty full, but I would have liked to have at least had to think about it. This was a no-brainer (in every conceivable sense).
Grade: D (It would have failed flat-out, but Lucille Bluth was in it, so I was lenient.)
