“Grosse Pointe”
Tomorrow night at 8:30 on WB/Ch. 11
BASED on its name alone, “Grosse Pointe” is a TV critic’s dream.
It’s just too tempting to write of this new WB series, “It’s grossly pointless!”
Truth be told, that statement only gets it half right: There’s nothing particularly gross about “Grosse Pointe,” but it is pointless.
“Grosse Pointe” is named for a Detroit suburb that is the locale of a fictional prime-time soap that’s meant to resemble such recent real-life series as “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Melrose Place” and “Savannah.”
The WB is billing the show as a send-up of TV soaps, which strikes me as a needless exercise. Soaps – whether in prime time or daytime – are so over-the-top on their own that they hardly need satirizing.
Not that that ever stopped anyone from spoofing them in the movies (“Soap Dish” and “Tootsie”) or on TV (in sketches seen on just about every variety show you ever saw in your entire life). And that means “Grosse Pointe” is not only needless, it’s also shamelessly derivitive.
The satire in “Grosse Pointe” consists of taking us behind the scenes at the fictional show’s Hollywood studio.
That’s not exactly an original concept. How many times in the last few years have you been taken behind the scenes at a Hollywood studio? Remember the great Robert Altman movie “The Player”? Remember “Action,” Jay Mohr’s bomb of a series last season on Fox?
Backstage at “Grosse Pointe,” we meet a scheming starlet (Irene Molloy) plotting to undermine a naive newcomer from the East (Bonnie Somerville); a balding leading man (Kohl Sudduth) trying to hide the fact that he’s a great deal older than the character he’s playing; and the series’ other male star (Al Santos) who has killed a few too many brain cells surfing, sunning and smoking pot.
There’s also a young, insecure female co-star (Lindsay Sloane) with a rich Hollywood father who was originally patterned after Tori Spelling; and two producers (William Ragsdale and Joely Fisher) fending off the demands of their cast members and network executives.
For tastelessness, nothing in the first three episodes provided for preview compares to the opening scene of the first episode, when the Scheming Starlet, in character as the pregnant Becky, awakens for the first time after a car accident and her mother tells her she’s lost her baby.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” weeps Becky, “I lose everything!”
Ha, ha – prime time’s first-ever miscarriage joke. The next time you run into Darren Star, the creator of “Grosse Pointe,” be sure to thank him for that one.