Take Me To The Pilots '13: The CW's 'Star-Crossed'

[In case you’ve Forgotten, and as I will continue to mention each and every one of these posts that I do: This is *not* a review. Pilots change. Sometimes a lot. Often for the better. Sometimes for the worse. But they change. Actual reviews will be coming in September and perhaps October (and maybe midseason in some cases). This is, however, a brief gut reaction to not-for-air pilots. I know some people will be all “These are reviews.” If you’ve read me, you’ve read my reviews and you know this isn’t what they look like.]

Show:“Star-Crossed” (The CW)
Airs:Midseason
The Pitch: “It’s like Roswell, only with aliens! Oh. Wait. It’s like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ if the only thing beastly about the Beast was a couple marks on his face! Oh. Wait. It’s like ‘Vampire Diaries’ if she were a human and he were the one with impressive powers! Oh. Wait. It’s like every CW show ever made. It’s The Uber-CW Show!”
Quick Response: On Thursdays at 9 p.m. this fall, The CW is airing the strange, risky, possibly off-brand period drama “Reign,” which isn’t such a terrific match with “Vampire Diaries” or anything else on the network. Part of what’s allowing The CW to take that chance is that the network has possibly the most on-brand piece of programming imaginable on its bench ready to go in. It’s hard to believe that Matt Lanter’s only been on one CW show. It’s hard to believe that Aimee Teegarden’s only CW experience is a couple episodes of “90210” and the first pilot for “The Selection.” Put them together and it’s a match made in brooding-but-affectless and wide-eyed-but-plucky heaven. Or does that sound too positive? Or negative? I really can’t say. There are aspects of Meredith Averill’s script that come across as a bit more layered than necessary — Teegarden’s character is an outsider because of health problems, while the crash landed aliens have a parallel Earth society that borrows more than a little from “District 9,” only with the ETs looking wicked hot instead of like prawns. It’s near-future speculative fiction and “Star-Crossed” has a few ideas regarding how people and society would react to this sort of close encounter and some of those reactions are slightly fresh and not so wildly outlandish (others are wildly outlandish and fairly stale), so I guess I appreciated that degree (some degree) of differentiation from “Roswell” and whatnot? Mostly, though, this is straight-forward, generic CW love-triangle stuff, made even more generic by the presence of Grey Damon, who seems to specialize in being in the middle of semi-supernatural love triangles on either The CW or ABC Family. [And no, I don’t remember if Hastings Ruckle and Julie Taylor ever shared quality time together, so “Star-Crossed” doesn’t get to benefit from additional “FNL” flashback glow in the way it might have if they’d cast Zach Gilford here. Teegarden is, incidentally, nearly unrecognizable here from her Dillon Days.] There’s a commentary on American immigration policy vis a vis aliens that there’s a 3% chance “Star-Crossed” might become. There’s a 97% chance that “Star-Crossed” will just become another CW show about the pretty girl torn between the man her loins crave and the man she knows is better for her psyche. And there’s a 60% chance that I’ll watch every episode of “Star-Crossed” no matter which show it becomes. Sigh. I’m weak and I feel like shows like “Star-Crossed” are mass-produced to take advantage of my weakness and the weakness of women aged 18-34. Damn you, CW.
Desire To Watch Again: Desire? Meh. Inevitability? Probably. I end up watching a lot of The CW. You know this about me. I watched the entire initial run of “Cult,” for heaven’s sake (before it got pulled and held to the summer, when I quit). It takes something as unbearable as “Beauty and the Beast” to scare me away. This is much, much better than “Beauty and the Beast,” though it’s much, much worse than “Vampire Diaries.” But is it worse than “Vampire Diaries” when it first premiered? Probably not. It’s just blander.

Take Me To The Pilots ’13: The CW’s ‘Star-Crossed’