In lieu of actual pilot screeners this summer, I’ve been getting e-mails from network publicity departments. Hey, we’ve got new publicity photos for 90210 available for the press! Check it out—we posted trailers for new NBC shows at our website!
And I’m all, yeah, dude! I’d love to download and reproduce your publicity stills and embed your glorified commercials on my blog! Hey, you know what would be really amazing? If you actually sent out the freaking pilots so I could see them before they air!
Sigh. Vent over. But I must admit that the 90210 e-mail did get me thinking. Fact is, I am curious, against my better instincts, about 90210. First, because The CW has apparently taken the approach of throwing a lot of talent against a crappy idea, hiring the likes of Jessica Walters and Tristan Wilds as well as a couple producers of Freaks & Geeks to run the show. Shows always live and die on execution, after all, and it’s a mistake to judge them on premise and predecessors alone: look at Battlestar Galactica, for instance. (You probably don’t want to look, on the other hand, at Knight Rider.)
But, sure, I’m interested in 90210. I have fond memories of the original. On the other hand, I have fond memories of the original: that translates as, I am a 40-year-old man. Does The CW—which sells its advertisers a dewy-fresh young audience—really want to attract me? What’s the value-add to doing a literal remake of 90210, when—in the spiritual sense anyway—every teen soap is a remake of 90210, but with the benefit of not actually having a TV Land nostalgia title, and thus, the stench of the elderly, attached?
Maybe 90210 has accumulated more of a Gossip-Girl-generation audience over the years than I’m accounting for, though, so I put the question to you: are you at all interested in the new 90210? And should The CW want you to be?
In the meantime, I’ll be watching my screener of BBC America’s Skins. Now that’s something completely different.