Word: soap
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...early '90s producers Aaron Spelling and Darren Star were the Obi-Wan and Luke of empty-calorie entertainment. They teamed on the teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210 and its spin-off Melrose Place, Spelling lending young Star his powerful name and expertise, Star supplying fresh ideas to the eminence glitz who gave us Dynasty and The Love Boat...
...like Adam Carrington on Dynasty, Star went prodigal. He struck out on his own, becoming a critical hit with Sex and the City, which classed up the Spelling formula: lusty stories of beautiful people--this time with brains. Now, in true soap-opera fashion, he has returned with a new series (cue ominous music) that has shaken the Spelling empire to its very foundations...
Grosse Pointe (the WB, Fridays starting Sept. 22, 8:30 p.m. E.T.) is a sitcom a clef: a behind-the-scenes satire of a teen soap that more than slightly resembles 90210. The pilot spares no one: not Star, whose clone on Pointe is a smarmy phony; not Shannen Doherty, whose reign of terror on the 90210 set is replicated eerily by Hunter Fallow (Irene Molloy). Nicely cast and smartly paced, it's a sassy, catty riot...
...case of Betty Sizemore (a divinely innocent Renee Zellweger), the effect is a spectacular one. A hash-house waitress in Fair Oaks, Kans., she has always been a fan of A Reason to Love, a television soap opera of the General Hospital type. Traumatized, in what the shrinks call a fugue state, she completely enters the soap's slightly tacky alternative reality. Convinced that its leading hunk, Dr. David Ravell (the amusingly actorish Greg Kinnear), is her long-lost fiance, she sets off for Los Angeles, intent on rekindling this imaginary old flame...
...between the script's lines. Zellweger blooms in this context. Her naivete is radical, of course, but that imparts a fierce serenity to her quest. Mostly, the people she encounters on the road and in Los Angeles quickly come to understand that she is off her rocker--except the soap-opera folk, who think she's an actress going to any lengths for a job--but there is such sweetness in her determination, such an endearing faith in the destiny she alone perceives, that they help her along. Zellweger is lovely in the role...