Camp

Griffiths does her best to hold the show together as a scattered woman coming into her own.

It's an old story. But co-creator Liz Heldens is fluent in teen-speak. [19 Jul 2013, p.80]

There is an abundance, rather over-abundance, of story lines and clichés.

Ironically, Griffiths at times may be a little too much actress for her role. But it takes a village to make a Camp, and watching this crew work to save Little Otter and find summer love is far from the worst thing you could do at 10 o’clock on Wednesday night

What’s the excuse for airing this thing? There’s not a funny word in it.

The characters, scripts and performances are surprisingly smart--almost, dare I say, deep. And you still get the comic humiliations, nasty rivalries and teeny bikinis.

This new hour-long comedy is a bustling, rather scattered affair. [15 Jul 2013]

The younger campers and counselors all have dramas, too, some interesting enough to make me wonder why Little Otter needed so many adults in the first place. None, though, is so compelling that I've stopped regretting the loss of ABC Family's much better "Huge," which starred Nikki Blonsky as a rebel in a weight-loss camp.

Camp has a sweetness that makes it a nice summer diversion but nothing that elevates it above past comedies set at sleepaway camp.

Camp is wildly inferior to any number of delightful extant fictions about summer camp,”Wet Hot American Summer,” “Huge,” “Camp Nowhere,” “Salute Your Shorts” and Meg Wolitzer’s new novel “The Interestings” among them, but it has a certain high energy.

Camp essentially needs to calm down and narrow its central focus on maybe half the characters and storylines it bombards us with.

Clearly, there's a new camp experience to be mined. Early on, though, Camp doesn't do much digging.

Camp's most criminal offensives surface as it endeavors to deliver worldly moral lessons through cringe-worthy revelations of its characters' dimwittedness and vast cultural intolerances.

Camp tries to sound cleverer than its conceit, but the series is most appealing when it keeps in mind that everybody has a story to tell about that one special summer at sleep-away camp.

The show, starring Six Feet Under’s Rachel Griffiths (as the camp manager going through a divorce from her husband/business partner), has sweetness and good-hearted humor.

Too silly and slight for grown-ups, too corny for the MTV generation, Camp is like an overheated ABC Family potboiler.

What emerges, in the three episodes made available for review, is an accessible, easily imbibed summertime series that basically beats actually going to camp for an entire gut-wrenching summer.

By the second hour, though, Camp has already resorted to a “capture the flag” team competition and a slow-motion water-balloon fight, and over-employed the device of having Mackenzie bare her deepest, darkest secrets to a small chorus of friends. The third hour rebounds only slightly, and by then it’s pretty clear an energetic and attractive cast isn’t enough to make the Down Under-lensed doings rise much above the mundane.

It’s all good, clean fun that is not quite good, not quite clean and not quite fun.