Melrose Place

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.