Eastwick
Crushing, crushing failure.
I’m sure the pitch for Eastwick made sense: “It’s like Desperate Housewives, but with magic!” Well, OK, that does sound like it has potential. The women of Wisteria Lane as witches would certainly be even more cutthroat and the show would be even sexier and more violent — people seem to forget that Desperate Housewives opened with an on-screen suicide before the very first opening credits, and the rest of the series has been narrated by ghosts — and the Witches of Eastwick film had both to spare.
Unfortunately, somewhere between the pitch and the screen, all of the danger, edge and sexiness has been bled out of the concept. The movie — with Jack Nicholson, instead of a generic pretty guy who speaks in a low voice — is highly sexualized, to the point that the audience is supposed to question, just as the characters do, about how they feel about the women sharing Darryl van Horn between them. Here, that’s all taken out, since no one is sleeping with him, and the sexuality comes from new real-life mother Rebecca Romijn’s cleavage. (Attention, television executives: It’s 2009. Cleavage is not edgy. Even Disney princesses have cleavage now.)
The future witches of Eastwick all have imperfect lives, but they’re neither the somewhat realistic lives of quiet desperation of the movie, nor the technicolor, larger than life lives of desperation on Desperate Housewives. They have unconvincing problems that might as well have been recycled from a bad sitcom. Pretty reporter (working for an implausibly nice tiny hometown newspaper) has glasses and a bun so she can’t talk to the male model newspaper photographer. Rebecca Romijn, in one of the few echoes of the movie, is called a slut, apparently because she shows her cleavage. (This is New England, after all.) The redheaded one is a doctor or a nurse or something and is married to the guy who knocked her up, stuck around, and now is out of work and drinks Budweiser. These are hardly trials out of Greek myth. The wooden Darryl offering to help them escape all of this (although he mostly spouts dumb New Age mumbo jumbo, apparently not realizing it’s 2009, and overplaying his hand by showing that he knows all of their personal secrets, instead of merely hinting at it, as the Jack Nicholson version did in the movie) isn’t offering anything particularly enticing as a result.
All genre television shows, no matter how rotten, seem have at least one good idea. The unwatchable New Amsterdam a few seasons back, which was about an immortal New Yorker, featured a senior citizen sidekick who was actually the lead character’s son, for instance. Here, it’s the suggestion that this television show is not a remake of the Witches of Eastwick, but may in fact be a sequel. (Subsequent episodes, if the show lasts that long, will either prove or disprove the theory.) That opens up some fun possibilities, principally among them the possibility that Cher, Susan Sarandon or even Michelle Pfeiffer might show up, if the show improbably became a monster hit, for instance.
But it won’t happen. These witches are getting tied to the stake and set ablaze in five more airings or less, I’m guessing.
(And poor Lindsay Price: She’s good here, as always, in an utterly ridiculous part and a show that, once again, is clearly doomed. She keeps ending up on projects with an obvious expiration date stamped on them. Time to get a new manager, I think.)
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