Reverse McGinleys

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - 0 Comments

Not only don’t I care about Heather Locklear appearing on the “new” Melrose Place, I don’t even care enough to write about how much I don’t care. But it does remind me that Locklear has spent most of her career being added to the casts of shows that already started, and she has one of the better track records on that score. I’ve called her a “reverse Ted McGinley,” which of course is unfair to McGinley. He’s usually been added to long-running shows after a major cast member leaves, so the shows wouldn’t have gotten better with or without him (some would argue that he improved Married With Children). But Aaron Spelling kept adding Locklear midway through the first or second seasons of shows that had potential but weren’t quite there: he added her to Dynasty — though it was the addition of Joan Collins that saved that show – then TJ Hooker, and most importantly Melrose Place. Then she joined Spin City, not exactly improving it but probably giving it the boost it needed to survive the departure of Michael J. Fox.

The lesson appears to be that if the new Melrose could get her as a regular, it would probably survive. It probably can’t, though, and even if she did join the show full time, she could never recapture her greatest moment of crime-fighting glory.

Also, while on the subject, here’s a taste of what Entertainment Tonight was like 25 years ago. By comparison with today’s insider-showbiz shows, it seems kind of serious-minded, in a fluffy/puffy sort of way.

Tonight Was Melrose Night And The Excitement Was Palpable

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 at 2:17 AM - 3 Comments

Tonight was the premiere of the new Melrose Place, and I’ll be interested to hear what the reactions are. I had a negative reaction to the pilot, finding that it wasn’t fun enough to make the trashiness work, and that the most loathsome characters were the relatively “nice” ones. (In particular, the filmmaker-wannabe who won’t grow up and his wonderful girlfriend. They say cute things and watch cute videos and they’re just a horrible example of what Hollywood thinks of as a cute couple. The only time I had any affection for the guy at all was when it looked like he might take up a career in blackmail.) I guess other people were more favourably disposed to it. But as for me, what I said a few months ago still sums up my view of this pilot.

One additional thing I will say about the pilot is that I think that, like most attempts to create a new prime-time soap, it doesn’t quite grasp the difference between a prime-time soap and a regular prime-time serial. Networks keep trying to revive the elements of the Dynasty, Dallas, Melrose Place type of soap, with their backstabbing, shifting alliances, and divisions between characters who are good (but corruptible) and bad (but not so different from the good ones in what they want and what they’re willing to do). But they seem to treat these subjects to the type of structure, pacing and cutting that is common to most serialized shows, even the higher-class ones.

And while serialized non-soaps have a lot of roots in soap opera, they’re not exactly the same thing. A serialized drama is a show that traces people through a big over-arching story arc. It’s meant to convey the feeling that this is all part of one story and it’s building up to some kind of conclusion. A soap opera is the storytelling equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. It is not supposed to build up to a conclusion, or even suggest the possibility of a conclusion, and its characters are not usually supposed to grow or change except in highly melodramatic, spectacular ways. Its purpose is to engineer excuses for characters to come into conflict, threaten each other, be betrayed by each other, or sleep with each other (sometimes all at once), and so it proceeds on a scene-by-scene basis. Each scene provides a (hopefully) satisfying confrontation and also leaves us with something that points the way forward to another conflict/confrontation to come. Lost and Friday Night Lights have soap elements, but they also have stories to tell, and the soapy moments are (hopefully) at the service of the story. On a soap opera, the story is a mechanism for delivering big confrontation set pieces.

The techniques used on the new Melrose Place seem to be those of the serial drama, including the CW’s own shows like Gossip Girl — especially the use of short scenes and other Continue…
The five new TV shows worth watching (and a couple to ignore)

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 4 Comments

Let critic Jaime J. Weinman be your fall TV guide

The new TV season is upon us, and you know what that means: yet another list of shows to watch and ones to avoid. Of course, shows have a way of improving or declining after their first couple of episodes, which means that as the season goes on, any of these early hits could become misses, and vice versa. But for now, here are some TV premieres to look out for. Continue…
The New Melrose Place: Pilot Impressions

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 8, 2009 at 11:59 AM - 2 Comments

I watched the pilot of the new Melrose Place (which may or may not be the version that finally airs) over the weekend, and don’t really know what to say about it. It seems closer to the style of original than the new 90210 does, and unlike that revival, this one wants to start off on a high melodramatic note. Though that may not be a good thing: it just points up the ways in which it falls short of the original’s wonderfully insane Aaron Spellingosity. But what really struck me about this new show is that I just don’t feel like hanging with any of these characters, and the ones I hate the most are the ones who are supposed to be the “likable” ones. Maybe that will change when the series starts.

So if you want real thoughts on the new Melrose, thoughts that actually make sense, then check out the Televisionary’s review (spoilers included). All I can do is re-print some notes I made after watching that pilot. This is cut way down from the original, so consider yourselves lucky.

SPOILER SPACE

The main characters of the new Melrose Place are as follows:

Continue…
Oh, God, Please, No, Anything But That. No.

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 11:54 AM - 6 Comments

When I first saw this story I thought the headline was a cruel, cruel joke. But it’s actually the cruel, cruel truth.

A spokesperson for The CW confirms what has been buzzed about for months: The network is developing an update of Melrose Place. Details remain sketchy, but it’s believed Melrose 2.0 would launch next fall.

A 90210 revival was at least something that made a certain amount of theoretical sense. Other high-school shows have had “next generation” revivals. But Melrose? Without Aaron Spelling or Darren Star (who will not be involved with this one either), what’s the point? Unlike 90210, with its valuable life lessons and PSAs, Melrose didn’t have much redeeming social value once they added Heather Locklear; it was a Spelling trashfest, a tribute to his genius at appealing to our worst instincts without ever making us feel guilty. (Most TV producers clearly have contempt for this kind of material and would prefer to be doing something better. With Spelling, you knew that trash was what he loved and what he wanted to be doing; as a commenter of mine put it, “his shows were dumb, but they weren’t dumbed down.”) It would be great fun to see a gleefully trashy show in that style, but a more “sophisticated” version of Melrose is not something to look forward to — 90210 is having trouble handling the writers’ attempt to make it less trashy than the original, but if you take out the trash from Melrose, you’ve got nothing.

What comes next? A remake of the Melrose spinoff Models, Inc?