Thanks to cindied for posting this on the message board!<\/p>\n
From TV Guide Online:<\/p>\n
\nCHRONIC YOUTH
\nRoswell (9 pm\/ET, WB)<\/p>\nThis would be the column where I annoy the WB’s programming department, assume a lowly TV writer knows more than a cadre of highly paid development executives and lecture them on the glut of beautiful-youth shows.<\/p>\n
Except I don’t have to \u2014 the audience is already hammering the point home via the vote-with-the-remote process.<\/p>\n
Did you catch Brutally Normal? My guess is no. And you’ve got plenty of company: The pretty-kid comedy \u2014 not especially horrible but not particularly good, either \u2014 went brutally unnoticed, expelled after five scant weeks. Zoe (n\u00e9e Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane; n\u00e9e Zoe Bean) has been suspended for now due to obstinate viewers who just won’t tune in no matter what they call it. It seems photo-rific, Aapri-scrubbed faces simply aren’t enough to shoulder a series in the absence of intriguing concepts and scripts. (Cue the exasperated suits: “What? Not edgy enough? Hot enough? What?”)<\/p>\n
It’s not news that the WB espouses a canny strategy that works pretty well so long as Madison Avenue buys it \u2014 the overall size of the audience doesn’t matter as much as its demographic, in this case the Skittles- and Christina Aguilera-purchasing crowd with cash to burn. However, when even they don’t watch, everyone scrambles to figure out what went wrong. In this case, I argue for focusing on what’s going right \u2014 then doing more of it. You can start with Roswell.<\/p>\n
Roswell does its most obvious selling points \u2014 good-looking kids, heart-on-the-sleeve teen alienation (literal and figurative) \u2014 one better with a talented cast, solid storytelling and touching moments that could easily come off badly in less skillful hands.<\/p>\n
October’s pilot deftly laid out the promise of the then-fledgling series: As the festival crowd gleefully cheers the reenactment of the mythical spacecraft crash, we pan across the stricken, flame-lit faces of Max (Jason Behr), Michael (Brendan Fehr) and Isabel (Katherine Heigl). They’re not enjoying a live special-effects show \u2014 they’re watching their parents burn.<\/p>\n
Powerful stuff subtly done, and the youth genre \u2014 comedy and drama alike \u2014 should favor such adroit touches over whooshing camera moves or MTV-esque smash cuts.<\/p>\n
Tonight, Max, Liz (Shiri Appleby) and the others find that the key to the young aliens’ mysterious past might be to unseal it with a kiss… and maybe more than one. \u2014 Michael Peck <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thanks to cindied for posting this on the message board! From TV Guide Online: CHRONIC YOUTH Roswell (9 pm\/ET, WB)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[40],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roswell","tag-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}