Melrose Place

A canny revamp, well-lit and visually eye-popping in a shadowy-neon way that hints at the old with several familiar faces while showcasing newcomers including redheaded Ashlee Simpson-Wentz.

The new Melrose Place may not be the old, but it is, all told, instantly engaging and--from the evidence--likely to remain so.

Executive producers Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer ("Smallville") tie the show's tangle of plots and relationships together with an agile skill that makes this new Melrose Place more appealing than the show's concept suggests should be possible.

It remains to be seen whether the new Melrose will become as giddily addictive as its predecessor--but it's off to a promisingly dizzy start.

With murder, prostitution, blackmail and hot lesbians in just the first episode, it won't be long before that iconic swimming pool boils over. Innocence lost is always fun to watch, especially when it's this good-looking.

Terrific fun, and much classier than the old show, but still with plenty of cheese.

So I "like" the new Melrose Place, in that I think it has the potential to be as addictive, and phony, as a can of Pringles potato crisps.

At this point, about all one can definitively say is whether the cast has potential (they do) and the situations are involving (they aren’t, unless you’re predisposed to such nonsense). On the plus side, the producers pay sly homage to the program’s roots without appearing beholden to it, indicating that the show will have the latitude to evolve into its own entity.

It does, however, wisely retain some of the elements that worked in the original, like characters who are interesting without being deep. We watch them because of what they do, not because we think there's a lot there.

Yes, there’s much that’s awful here, as there always was--some laughably bad acting, portentous flashbacks telegraphed so obviously you expect the screen to do one of those wiggly dissolves, writing that won’t cause Matthew Weiner (or his kids) any sleepless nights--and yet there’s an enjoyably lurid energy to this place that makes it only about 1,000 times more instantly watchable than last season’s dreary redo of 90210.

No one appearing on Melrose Place 2.0 is nearly that dreadful, and the one-liners that remind us that we are not watching the television of a historic golden age retain the zesty camp of the series’s first iteration.

Trouble is, very few of the show's other cast members make much of an impression, aside from Cassidy and Stephanie Jacobsen, whose medical-student plot is lifted straight from the Soap 101 handbook.

How much you'll actually care about any of them may decide whether you're ready to embrace the new Melrose Place.

It's competent. It also seems a little familiar and unnecessary.

Over all, the show has a little something, but it doesn’t have outstanding curb appeal, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a foreclosure notice in the window sooner rather than later.

How interested will viewers be in its fictional scandals when real life offers much more sensational examples of bad behavior?

If only it were possible to care, even the least little bit, who did what and why and what will happen next. But as of the end of Episode 2, it just isn't.

The CW, having exhausted every bit of its creative energy on The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll, is now simply remaking Fox's old prime-time soap lineup one by one. And the garden apartment complex at No. 4616, though filled with a new collection of 20-something drama queens, is the same vortex of hyperkinetic hormones, ambition and criminality that it always was.

Melrose does a better job integrating its two casts, and it embraces what it is: a trashy remake of one of the most memorably trashy hits in primetime history. It's still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about its badness, you know?

Perhaps Leighton has a huge fan base, but nothing in her cold, starched, tightly stretched rehash of Sydney would explain her appeal to the uninitiated. Still, the apartment complex does look inviting, as do many of the Los Angeles hot spots that are being used as sets.

It seems a statement of the obvious to call the new Melrose trash, but a reviewer must observe certain formalities--and at least it is trash we can dig into and learn something from,

It's all soapy nonsense with emotional entanglements underscored by catchy and moving pop songs.