KEY POINTS:
The Germans have a great term for an annoying song or bit of music that you can't get out of your head: an "ear worm". One of these aural parasites attacked me when watching last night's debut of - gasp - 90210 (TV3, 7.30pm).
But first, let us
note the makers' insistence that this is not a remake; it's a spin-off of the teen soap that brought us such unforgettable cultural advancements as the bratty bad girl antics of star Shannen Doherty.
With its first scenes of an apple-pie family arriving from Kansas to live in the sun and sin-soaked suburb with the premier zip code, it looked just like a remake to me. So let's just call it an update.
Sweet young siblings Annie and Dixon Wilson's arrival in the sports-car crammed school carpark seemed a straight rerun too, until we hit the scene of the school stud having a, er, Hugh Grant moment in the car before class.
Yep, this show is trying very hard to be edgy in a much tougher market than its 1990s parent.
One of the Wilson kids is an adopted African-American, thus proving that, no matter what happens in the presidential race, America is ready for a black kid to play a lead in a rich kids teen soap.
Grandma, owner of the big pile that the family move into, is as fond of sizzling sexual innuendo as she is of her Long Island iced teas. And you would have never heard Mrs Walsh saying a line like this to her hubby's ex-girlfriend: "We can swap stories about Harry's penis." But its most risque move was opening with the line "this sucks", an observation that surely is sorely tempting fate.
The ear worm attacked when we met the girl shelling out $200 for some interesting looking pills, a scene which instantly evoked Mr G's song, "She's a naughty girl, with a bad habit for drugs". And there is the problem. Can anyone, even the target audience, take a teen high school soap seriously after Summer Heights High? (Perhaps that's why 90210 has failed to rate in Australia.)
It doesn't really help its bid to be the hippest new kid on the box by bringing back original cast members Doherty and Jenni Garth, as school play director and school guidance counsellor respectively. There are sad rumours that Tori Spelling, Luke Perry, etc, might return to guest star.
There are in-jokes and references to the old show and some of the characters are offspring of the originals but it's unlikely any of today's customers are going to care. Nor are they likely to get the potential irony of such lines between a reunited Brenda and Kelly as, "we wasted a lot of time over the years".
So here's the scary thing: do the makers actually expect original fans to revisit this show? You never know in telly land where every year seems more regressive and nobody is expected to grow up and move on.