Pilot Inspektor: An Advance Review of CW's "Melrose Place"

If you're like me, you remember watching episodes of the original Melrose Place with a zeal bordering on near obsession.

After all, this was a nighttime soap where anything--and in fact, everything--was possible: from apparent returns from the dead to jaw-dropping plot twists (Kimberly removing that wig, anyone?) to bombs going off right in the namesake apartment building that housed most of the characters.

So I'll say then that expectations were high for the CW's revamp of Melrose Place, which the netlet will launch later this fall. Would the new incarnation of Melrose Place live up not to only one of Los Angeles' most tony streets but also to the original series, which pushed the envelope in terms of over the top plots?

I had the opportunity a few days ago to watch the full pilot episode of Melrose Place, written by former Smallville producers Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer and directed by Davis Guggenheim, and sadly I have to say that I was pretty disappointed by what I saw.

Perhaps it was this new series' overly contrived set-up--a dead body discovered floating in the apartment complex's iconic pool that echoes that of Melrose Place spin-off Models Inc. and the death of Melrose's own Brooke Armstrong (Kristin Davis)--the fact that the producers clearly felt their script couldn't convey the emotions necessary to tell their story that they overloaded the episode with so much music that every thirty second span seemed to be filled with a snippet from yet another song, or the inexplicable return of Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton) to the land of the living.

So just what did I think of the new Melrose Place's pilot episode? Let's discuss. (Beware: there are MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.)

Viewers of the original Melrose Place have been scratching their heads trying to fathom just how Sydney could be alive and running the apartment complex after she was last seen getting run down... on her wedding day, no less. (No, no one ever accused the original Melrose Place of subtlety.) I will say that the actual chain of events is slightly glossed over but Sydney's seeming resurrection is dealt with head on as we're told that Sydney didn't actually die that day but instead faked her death (for reasons yet untold) with the help of her one-time lover Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro, who reprises his role here).

I'm not quite sure why Sydney wanted out of married life so badly but it seems that she and Michael had elaborately staged her death in order to... Again, I'm not quite sure what Sydney got out of the arrangement or why she would come back now to Los Angeles and move in to the building where she used to live, using her real name, and take over management responsibilities while living in an apartment her tenants have dubbed "the penthouse."

But, just like the first time around, Sydney's second chance at life is fraught with complication. In this case, it's the fact that no sooner do we see Syd again in the flesh, than does she wind up murdered and floating in the swimming pool. Shock, horror!

Everyone in the apartment complex is a suspect but no one seems all that distraught by the fact that their landlord was killed a few feet from them. Certainly, they're not too shaken up that they don't throw a party right next to the spot where Sydney was killed... less than twenty-hour hours after her murder, despite the twenty-somethings' claims that Sydney was a friend. (Also strange: only one of them is actually questioned by the police.)

These twenty-something tenants aren't all that well-developed in the pilot episode and it's pretty unclear just why they considered the bitchy Sydney a friend. (Some poorly constructed flashbacks seek to fill in the blanks about their past encounters with Syd.) They are the sort of upwardly mobile Angelenos that pack the bar nightly at any number of LA hotspots. Bisexual publicist Ella Simms (Supernatural's Katie Cassidy), who is clearly meant to exude the icy/hot bitchiness of the original series' Heather Locklear, shared a contentious relationship with her former mentor Sydney, who was looking to have her evicted, and gives an alibi for the prime suspect. Elswhere, hotshot sous chef Auggie Kirkpatrick (All My Children's Colin Egglesfield) is harboring a certain blood-stained secret about the night Sydney got killed, despite the fact that he owes his career to the murdered woman yet was clearly avoiding her the last few weeks.

Meanwhile, medical student Lauren Yung (Sarah Connor Chronicle's Stephanie Jacobsen) finds herself in a bind when her father can no longer afford to pay her tuition and is propositioned by a patient's son (Without a Trace's Adam Kaufman) to sleep with him for five thousand dollars. Manboy Jonah Miller (Swingtown's Michael Rady) is a wannabe film director who pays the bills by shooting parties; he proposes to his live-in girlfriend Riley Richmond (Cloverfield's Jessica Lucas), an elementary school teacher, but she doesn't immediately jump at the shot at marrying him despite their five blissful years of dating. (Rady's sadsack romantic Jonah is clearly meant to be a substitute for Andrew Shue's wide-eyed Billy Campbell.)

Rounding out the cast is eighteen-year-old Violet Foster (7th Heaven's Ashlee Simpson-Wentz) who has just arrived in Los Angeles and refers to herself rather ominously as a "good girl" even as she swipes a framed photograph of Sydney at her makeshift memorial in the courtyard. (Hmmm, could the flame-haired Violet be Sydney's daughter perhaps?) And then there's the bad boy David Breck (Shark's Shaun Sipos) who happens to be Sydney's on-again-off-again lover, the brooding son of Michael Mancini (Calabro), and... an art thief?!? This latter reveal is a little ludicrous, even for the notoriously over the top Melrose Place, especially as David doesn't seem clever enough to tie his own shoelaces without help, much less pull off high-stakes solo heists.

The original Melrose Place wasn't exactly known as Emmy bait but it had an energy and verve that made it addictive viewing. Here, Slavkin and Swimmer's script seems rather sodden and, as I mentioned previously, the overabundance of music threaded through every single scene makes me question whether these showrunners trust in the audience to know which emotion the dialogue and action are attempting to evince. We get that the proposal scene between Jonah and Riley is meant to be upbeat and romantic without having a pop track blaring in the background, which it does in EVERY scene.

I will give credit to Melrose's actors, who do their best with the mediocre material that they've been given here. In particular, Jacobsen and Rady come off as likable and sympathetic and their characters are given the most shading, even as Rady's Jonah makes an incredibly unbelievable decision to turn down six figures to write a script after he catches a producer making out with his daughter's teenage friend at a party. The original Melrose Place succeeded not because of the earnestness of its first batch of episodes but because, once it found its footing, it pushed its flawed characters to sometimes make the wrong decisions. Here, there's an off-putting cuteness that's totally at odds with the ongoing murder subplot, the art thievery, and the potential prostitution.

To me, this Melrose Place is a pale shadow of the original series, filled with some mightily one-dimensional characters that attempt to recapture the spark of the 1990s version's characters and update the action for a celebrity-obsessed youth culture that watches the channel's own Gossip Girl and 90210. But it tries way too hard to shoehorn in some mawkish sentimentality instead of just having fun with the concept. Furthermore, I'm not really convinced that Swimmer and Slavkin are the right showrunners for this series, based on the tonal inconsistencies of the pilot and the lackluster scripting.

Sure, the original Melrose Place took a bit of time to find its path (aided, of course, by the arrival of Heather Locklear to stir things up among the sleepy cast) but this version seems to be television-by-the-numbers. Yes, Melrose's producers have thrown in a murder, some sex and scandal, and some mystery but there's still something that feels underwhelming and dispiriting about this update and not at all like organic, compelling, and ultimately addictive television. It might be young, but I can't shake the feeling that this Melrose Place already needs a face-lift.



Melrose Place will air Tuesday nights at 9 pm ET/PT this fall on the CW.