Soap duds

PALM BEACH STORY First, have an awkwardly adorable meet-cute. Then, have a formal event where someone gets punched. Tada: a teen drama.

Cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows. Workplace comedies, family sitcoms. But is there any show more delicious, more entertaining, more trashy and excellent and unmissable than the teen drama? 90210. Dawson’s Creek. The OC. Sadly for the struggling CW, Hidden Palms isn’t getting added to that list any time soon.

From the tawdry mind of Dawson’s and Scream creator Kevin Williamson comes Palms, a South Beach–set teen soap with murder-mystery leanings. Johnny Miller is fresh out of rehab, but still dealing with his father’s suicide, when his mom and stepdad decide to move to sunny Palm Springs. As viewers know, any teen drama worth its weight in Clearasil adheres to the policy of the skimpier the outfits, the darker the secrets. A show set in Miami, you say? Bring on the bikini brigade.

Said brigade is led by the sultry alpha-girl Greta and her hunky pal Cliff. The two bonded over the mutual loss of her boyfriend and his best friend, Eddie, when Eddie killed himself (or did he?!?) in what’s now Johnny’s bedroom. Throw in a nerd-cute but dark nosy next-door neighbor Liza, and Johnny’s friend from rehab, the naughty Nikki, and you’ve got yourself one angsty, scantily dressed ensemble.

Where Palms struggles is how recognizable some of its cast is. Taylor Handley may have gone blond to play Johnny, but he’ll always be the psycho Oliver from the first season of The OC to us. Speaking of Newport, Michael Cassidy is appropriately creepy as the dangerous, philandering Cliff, but we loved him first as Zach, Summer’s boyfriend and Seth’s rival from season two. Cliff puts the moves on party-girl Nikki, whom Tessa Thompson plays exactly the same as she played Jackie, her loathsome character on Veronica Mars.

But the familiar faces in the teen (teen-playing, at least) cast have nothing on the ’rents. Who’d have thought Gail O’Grady and Sharon Lawrence would have an NYPD Blue reunion as dippy moms on a mediocre soap? Lawrence is perfectly over-the-top as Cliff’s boozy Southern belle of a mom, but O’Grady is a little shrill as Johnny’s anxious madre. Once Kyle Secor (another Veronica Mars alum) pops up as Greta’s rarely seen father, it’s hard to tell whether Palms is going for camp or just landing there accidentally.

And that’s the essence of Palm’s problem: The mystery aspects work just fine, but the soap and drama just aren’t there. The increasingly spooky clues about Eddie’s suspicious death and each character’s ever-more-complicated potential involvement hum along beautifully, with surprising twists and a scare now and then. But when it comes to the relationships among the characters, where the real identity of a teen drama is generated, Palms chokes. He cheats on her, she lies to him, he does it with the other guy’s mom, her love is pure and chaste from afar—nothing develops with any meaningful intensity. Teen dramas are supposed to embrace the rawness of the adolescent heart, acknowledge its capriciousness, revel in its absurdity. Palms is far too stingy in rationing its emotions, and even the ostensibly sexy scenes are sanitized and inorganic.

Williamson seems to have abandoned the most addictive parts of Dawson’s—the high-stakes love triangles, shreds of sexual chemistry—and instead kept its most irritating feature: the endless overuse of character names in dialogue. “Joey Potter” was uttered once every three seconds (or so) on Dawson’s, and that was an annoying enough problem. But when the lead character is named Johnny, and it isn’t, oh, 1950, the lines take on an unintentional but undeniable hilarity. “Eddie was murdered, Johnny.” We defy anyone to hear that line and not laugh a little. “Oh, Johnny.” “Johnny, this is serious.” “What’s wrong, Johnny?” The show never builds momentum because ridiculous, ear-clogging lines like those constantly ruin any dramatic pressure. Johnny.

It’s a shame. We’re dying for a campy teen soap to take us through the summer, and Palms should have been it. But it lacks wit and self-awareness, vivacity and charm. Johnny Miller, you’re no Seth Cohen. Or Dawson Leery. Or Brandon Walsh.

Hidden Palms debuts Wednesday 30 at 7pm on the CW.