Wrong Place, Wrong Time

For a serial to be truly effective it has to have stories that grab you and demand that you come back week after week. When Melrose Place originally aired on Fox in the ‘90s, it was just that kind of show. Not that it could ever be classified as “good,” mind you, but in the realm of guilty pleasures it was hard to top. Those feelings of nostalgia make The CW’s new remake that much harder to sit through.

In this early stage, one of the new Melrose Place’s main focuses is a whodunit: Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton, whose death in the original turns out to have been conveniently faked), now the complex's landlord, is found floating dead in the pool. Right off the bat, we have a problem. Sydney was one of Melrose’s most annoying characters back in the day and, as we see in flashbacks, not much has changed. She’s still a conniving bitch, only now with the added burden of struggling with sobriety, as if that's supposed to make her seem sympathetic. She’s had negative interactions with nearly all of the building’s residents, so aside from the fact that one among them is apparently a murderer, it’s way too easy to shrug off her death and move on.

But what the show has to move on to isn’t all that interesting. There’s Jonah and Riley (Greek’s Michael Rady and Cloverfield’s Jessica Lucas), a budding filmmaker and his teacher girlfriend, newly engaged after five years of dating and still trying to work out some trust issues between them; Ella (Katie Cassidy, Harper’s Island), a publicist who is being set up as this version’s answer to Heather Locklear, though it'll take an awful lot for her to top Amanda Woodward; David (Shaun Sipos), who likes to steal things like paintings and watches, and is the previously unknown son of the cold and calculated Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro); Lauren (Stephanie Jacobsen), a med school student who starts pimping herself out to pay her tuition; and Violet (Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, showing that her acting chops have not progressed in the slightest since 7th Heaven went away), the building’s newest resident, who may or may not be Sydney’s long-lost daughter. So far, it’s a whole lot of nothing about nothing, with none of the dastardly intrigue that can make a show like this such untidy fun.

There’s nary an unattractive person in the bunch, but one of the most glaring mistakes the producers have made is in taking almost no effort to diversify the cast (it’s the same scenario over on the equally unnecessary remake of 90210, which, as it enters its second season, shows no signs of leaving vapidity behind). With the exception of a couple of token ethnic actors, the cast is otherwise lily white, a problem shared with the original. I know there are plenty of other shows that are guilty of this as well, but it seems to be more egregious here. I mean, what better place to open yourself up to diversity, in both an ethnic and story sense, than an apartment complex, where people from all walks of life converge? On both fronts, this incarnation of Melrose Place clearly misses the mark.