Thursday, June 26, 2014

Review - Mystery Girls


No.  No, no no.

I was a big fan of the original Beverly Hills 90210 that aired for a decade, and I enjoy seeing people from shows of the past reunite in new stuff, so I tuned in to this ... show ... which stars Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling.  So sorry I did.

This is a bad TV, my friends.  Bad writing, bad acting, so gaudy in its production design and way too over-the-top, which seems to be a trend for ABC Family comedies (see Melissa and Joey and the Young and Hungry).  This feels more like a show you'd see on Disney or Nickelodeon, being that it's so hammy and exaggerated. 

THE LOWDOWN

Mystery Girls is about follows two former detective TV show starlets brought back together by a real-life mystery. Charlie Contour (Garth) is a suburban housewife and mother, while Holly Hamilton (Spelling) longs for her glory days in the 90's when she was on television. Both of their lives are disrupted when Nick (Miguel Pinzon), a witness to a crime and a ‘Mystery Girls' fanatic, will only speak to the infamous duo, and the former friends must reunite and put their TV crime-solving skills to the test.

Now, I watched the episode entitled "Death Becomes Her," which is labeled Season 1 Episode 1, which implies it's the first episode of the series.  It's logical, then, that this first episode would set up the series and resemble the description presented by the network, as pilots usually do.  BUT IT DIDN'T!!!  This first-aired episode explained nothing about who these women are or what they do, nothing about their 90's show, no clear setup that they have a detective agency.  Suffice to say, I'm thoroughly baffled by what I was watching and as I write this, my brow is crinkled in utter confusion. 


Not to mention I would NEVER buy these women as detectives.  TV detectives, sure, in a comic way.  But the fact that we're supposed to believe these actresses (I'm talking about Garth's and Spelling's characters) then give the profession a go ... I guess I can see why it would be a funny premise, but it so doesn't work.  AT ALL.  It's so bad, I still can't believe I made it through the episode. 

Poor Garth seems to be taking her role seriously, giving her straight-man all and trying perhaps to recapture the mild success she had when she co-starred with Amanda Bynes in What I Like About You, her first post-90210 foray into episodic television.  Maybe she's just glad to be acting again.  She still looks great.

Spelling, who is supposedly the brainchild behind this debacle, is playing ditzy dumb to the hilt, which is not funny at all, just very sad.  I know her personal life is a bit of a train wreck right now, and maybe she just needs to go and have fun with an old friend, and that's great.  But not when it's this awful.  She does not have her dad's knack for creating entertaining TV.

Pinzon's Nick is like Sean Hayes' Jack (Will & Grace) on a hundred Red Bulls.  The former worked.  The latter does not.  This whole show doesn't work.

I will not be watching any more of Mystery Girls - unless they scored a cameo by Shannen Doherty, which would be worth suffering through 22 more minutes of for the sheer madness it would inevitably be.  But maybe I'm missing something, so feel free to check it out for yourselves ... if you absolutely have nothing better (laundry, getting your privates waxed, watching paint dry, listening to a symphony of nails being drawn down a chalkboard ...) to do.

Mystery Girls airs Wednesdays at 8:30pm on ABC Family.



1 comment:

  1. It is bad acting and writing. Too silly and bad funny. Overdressed, over done makeup like 2 rich girls who want to play at being P.I.s or detectives. They were better on 90210 and I expected it be a serious show, but watched it without doing my research and reviews first. I could only stand 10 minutes of it. It will or should cancelled after this 1 season.

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