Is "Reunion" Worth Attending

Fox has cornered the market on hour-long prime-time soap operas featuring exceptionally pretty people. The network that gave us Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, and The OC has gone back to the Ralph Lauren well again for Reunion -- a new prime time soap opera with a twist. The show focuses on six high school friends over the course of twenty years (each episode representing one year) as a detective (Six Feet Under’s Mathew St. Patrick) investigates the murder of one of the six. The big mystery -- who killed whom -- is not surprisingly the major hook of the show, but a great hook, no matter how great, is not enough to keep viewers.

Last year saw a handful of successful/critically acclaimed shows based around a central mystery. Lost is the most obvious, but the most relevant comparison to Reunion would be UPN’s Veronica Mars. The driving force of the plot engine for Veronica Mars was the murder of Veronica’s best friend Lilly Kane, but the show would not have been as wonderful as it was without the myriad complex and compelling characters (most notably Kirsten Bell's Veronica) involved in the mystery. The show was called Veronica Mars, not Who Killed Lilly Kane. And this is the distinction that Reunion seems to have missed. Lost and Veronica Mars are about characters, even though they involve interesting gimmicks. Reunion is a gimmick, its characters be damned.

I wouldn’t have given this show a shot had it not been for Alexa Davalos. A relative unknown, Alexa co-starred with Vin Diesel in Chronicles of Riddick but her most memorable role came as Gwen Raiden, a red-leather-clad assassin with the power of lightning, on Joss Whedon’s Angel. Appearing in a handful of episodes over the course of the series, Davalos demanded attention with her exotic sex appeal, striking charisma, and killer kung-fu moves (why couldn't see have shown up on Alias?). I don’t know where all that was on Thursday night; this striking young actress seemed gah bland.

As a writer, I subscribe to the belief that an actor is only as good as his/her material, and Reunion’s material is pedestrian and obvious. With the series starting in 1986, pop culture references abound (again focusing on the gimmick rather than the characters), but they’re handled in such an amateurish fashion, succeeding only in drawing attention to themselves. A character calling WHAM the next Beatles is not funny. It's not clever. It's certainly not subtle. It’s stupid. Nobody, no matter how musically retarded, would have ever made such a comment. If this is the best the show can get out its gimmick, they’re spoiling the one interesting thing the show had going.

But this sort of obvious handling shows up everywhere in the show. The one character we see in the present day is a frosty, chain-smoking, business woman with black nail polish. Who is this character in 1986? Of course, she’s the naïve, good girl. Shocker.

It’s clear from the opening episode and the promos for the upcoming season that the show intends to make everybody a suspect in the murder. This again seems obvious, and is an indication of the writers’ skill. A more interesting, more compelling show would have us agonizing over who committed the murder, not just curious about it. If we were fully invested in these characters, we wouldn’t want any of them to have committed the crime. Already the good-girl-turned-goth-feminist has lost my empathy (I'm actually sorry she wasn't the one killed), and I doubt any of the other characters will be handled with any more skill or ingenuity.

I’ll keep tabs on the show to find the answer to the big mystery, but that’s about it. I don’t feel like suffering through these uninspired characters to get there.