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By Barbara Card Atkinson
Special to MSN Entertainment
"Dirty Sexy Money," which
premiered Sept. 26, boasts a stellar cast (Jill Clayburgh, Peter Krause, Donald Sutherland) and promises a classic nighttime
soap premise: The morally conflicted Krause works for a band of wastrels, and
can't -- or won't -- walk away. Wealthy people acting badly while making other
people miserable? That's the essence of a nighttime soap!
Other
hallmarks of the genre include cat fights, backstabbing intrigue and
cliffhangers, with lots of sex, murder and adultery thrown in, all packaged in
an episodic format. While sitcoms are fully contained, soaps' stringing along of
the viewer week to week, with multiple story lines, is pretty much their entire
point. The nighttime soap has subcategories, including supernatural ("Twin Peaks," "X-Files"), paranoid ("Alias," "24"), earnest ("Brothers & Sisters," "Gilmore Girls"), lovelorn ("The L Word," "Grey's Anatomy") and goofy ("Scrubs," "Ugly Betty"). "Dirty Sexy Money"
comes to the game with a lot of promise, but it wouldn't have a chance without
the foundation laid by some popular forerunners. Here are the top categories for
guilty pleasure nighttime viewing:
Adolescent Angst
"Beverly Hills, 90210" appeared,
out of the gate, to be a hybrid, some sort of mix of after-school special and
gentle dramedy. The high school hallway hijinks, incongruously populated by
20-somethings sporting pancake makeup and boob jobs, included such cliffhangers
as Donna guarding her virginity and Brandon falling for the wrong girl.
Plotlines quickly morphed into more adult fare, involving drug addiction, sexual
assault and various deaths, with an ever-growing cast. "90210" ran for 10 years
(1990 - 2000) and the show's pop culture status helped launch the FOX
network. "90210" also propelled Tori Spelling and Shannen Doherty into many a gossip magazine and
launched both Jason Priestley and Luke Perry as teen idols (and their long sideburns as
a new lad fad). "90210" also spearheaded quite the backlash against Doherty, who
played the bratty, petulant Brenda with a little too much conviction. The series
also begat a spin-off: "Melrose Place" (which had a
spin-off of its own in "Models Inc.").
"Melrose Place" was set in a small apartment block in West Hollywood, Calif., and the show went from cautious to camp in record time, thanks utterly to the addition of Heather Locklear. Short version? Catty, fabulous Amanda sleeps with every major male character, except gay Matt, who never even gets a love interest, while Michael bumble-schemes and Kimberly battles the many voices in her head. And -- repeat! Minor Melrose player Kristin Davis went on to "Sex and the City," and wig-wearing, scar-bearing Marcia Cross, along with long-suffering Doug Savant, moved to the equally campy Wisteria Lane, home of "Desperate Housewives."
"Dawson's Creek" was not a direct lift from "90210," but it certainly was inspired by it, a "Beverly Hills, 90210" meets "Friends" as if reinterpreted by Woody Allen.
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