Melrose Place, The Vampire Diaries, and The Beautiful Life
The Poop: I hate to say it, but the Aaron Spelling formula is much harder to replicate that it might appear. That mixture of sleaze and character work that draws you in but makes you a little bit ashamed. (Remember that episode of Seinfeld?) With the exception of Ryan Murphy on Nip/Tuck, nobody really seems able to pull it off with any consistent success. It just seems like people are trying too hard to work the Spelling magic, and Melrose Place is a pretty sad example.
The characters are pretty much interchangeable, all being generically pretty. They all have ill-defined jobs that we’re never going to see them doing. Most irritating is the “nerdy filmmaker” character, who is the writers’ hilarious idea of a nerd. It’s one of my TV pet peeves, when they don’t bother to get the references right. They’ll drop vague references that serve to sort of generically indicate their interests. Melrose’s Jonah Miller is going to be one of those guys, like any episode of Heroes that has a scene in a comic book store that isn’t run by Seth Green, or Season One of The Big Bang Theory. (They got much better in Season Two, though.) Every appearance by this character made me die inside. (It turns out, the only filmmaker the writers can name is Quentin Tarantino.)
Subplots that should have been interestingly trashy, like Lauren’s date offering her $5,000 for sex, just seem like they’re trying too hard to be shocking. It’s all sort of boring and bland. I know I’m sort of shortchanging the review, but I really couldn’t keep my interest up enough to follow the stories. And with the sloppy writing, I have to think that the overarching mystery is going to have a deeply unsatisfying resolution or else be completely forgotten.
The Prognosis: I will never think about this show again. This could have been enjoyably sleazy, but it’s just forgettable. Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, prepared to be purged from my database.
The Vampire Diaries
CW, Thursday 8 PM
The Premise: Teenage vampires. That’s really all the pitch you need these days.
The Personnel: Based on a series of teen-oriented novels that are totally not Twilight. One of the 
titular vampires is Ian Somerhalder, best known as Boone from Lost. The cast also includes four women who were recently arrested in Georgia for flashing passing cars. That makes me like this show better.
titular vampires is Ian Somerhalder, best known as Boone from Lost. The cast also includes four women who were recently arrested in Georgia for flashing passing cars. That makes me like this show better.The Poop: This is generic teen soap opera, with vampires thrown in. This is a pet peeve of mine right now. See, vampires have been co-opted by goth wankers for a long time now. But this new Twilight boom has dumbed the concept down even further. By stripping vampires of everything that defines them, it leaves us with vaguely defined immortals. They always make a point of avoiding human blood, both in Twilight and here, there’s a dumb-ass workaround to allow them to go out in sunlight (They sparkle? Really?), no fangs, no transformations. So literally, every defining aspect of a vampire has been removed. What we have are immortal beings who make vague references to their hunger. Really, they’re more like Highlanders than vampires.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m a fan of classic horror and I want to reclaim vampires. I just think it’s incredibly lazy and disingenuous to write about vampires that don’t have any vampiric qualities whatsoever. You’re cashing in on a craze without doing any of the work. I’m not claiming that Bram Stoker wrote a textbook, but fiction has certain accepted attributes of vampires. If you want to pick and choose, that’s fine. My favorite vampire, Cassidy from Garth Ennis’ Preacher, doesn’t turn into a bat, but he’s immortal, thirsts for human blood, and explodes if exposed to sunlight. You can definitely identify him as a vampire. Not so for Edward Cullen or the two wanky brothers presented here.
At least Diaries doesn’t espouse profoundly screwed-up ideas about gender politics. Because, seriously, Twilight is really upsetting in its reactionary treatment of women. So that’s a point. But all in all, there’s nothing to enjoy here. An empty-headed, sloppy treatment of vampires, and sub-par plotting and scripting for everybody else. It really isn’t good.
The Prognosis: I don’t even like good vampire fiction. I can’t get through an episode of True Blood without getting bored and angry. So half-assed vampire fiction could not possibly be less interesting to me. Other than my irritation, I remember almost nothing about having watched this show.
The Beautiful LifeCW, CANCELLED
The Premise: The secret lives of runway models. Or something. There are also regular people who keep talking about their farm. There are two kinds of people: Models and Farmers.
The Personnel: A lot of people who are now unemployed. Produced by Ashton Kutcher, the cast includes Elle MacPherson and Mischa Barton. Yes, that Mischa Barton.
The Poop: The first cancellation of the season, with only two episodes aired. This goes in the All-Pilot Project Hall of Fame alongside Nashville, Viva Laughlin, and Do Not Disturb. Since Beautiful Life is already cancelled, and deservedly so, there’s not much point in reviewing one-half of its canon.
Instead, I’d like to talk about star Mischa Barton. Specifically, her time on The O.C. Even more specifically, a couple of TV tropes that she embodied during this run. Because frankly, I’m not interested in writing about The Beautiful Life.
Anyway, Barton’s character on The O.C., Marissa Cooper, got less and less likeable over the course of the series. She was shrill and whiny and selfish and always ground every story to a complete halt with her presence. But if you look at Season One, she was actually pretty cool. She was screwed up, but she refrained from doing openly awful things. I have this theory that sometimes a performer is so actively unpleasant in real life that the writers can’t help but reflect it in their character. Is it any coincidence that Debra on Everybody Loves Raymond got so unbearable at about the same time Patricia Heaton started screaming at people about Terri Schaivo? So, when a character becomes less likeable (and not in a fun way), I assume that they are actually awful people.
The other thing is something that I like to call “Pulling a Marissa”. See, they made Marissa very important to the show, but Barton is not a good actress, and couldn’t live up to the demands required of her. So instead, we spent several seasons seeing scenes where other characters would talk about how great Marissa is, but we never actually saw it in action. And when you’ve based a show around a character played by an actor without the necessary talent, that’s your only option. They had to do the same with Lana Lang on Smallville.
None of this is terribly interesting, but it’s way better than watching this damn show.
The Prognosis: CANCELLED! See you in hell, The Beautiful Life!
