“Dawson’s Creek” launched a slew of wannabes. Nearly a decade ago, the deeply introspective, psychobabbling young adults quickly became templates for the rest of television.
Now the “Dawson” creator has penned a new buzz-worthy hour.
In “Hidden Palms” (that’s code for Palm Springs), the tales are darker and less psychobabbly, but the characters are equally prone to love triangles.
If you liked “Dawson’s Creek,” “Veronica Mars,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “The O.C.” and other smart shows about self-aware types, this summer offers hope.
Welcome to “Hidden Palms,” debuting at 7 p.m. Wednesday on KWGN-Channel 2. (Given the violent and adult content, particularly in the pilot, the time slot is too early in this part of the country.)
The little CW network has been quiet about the series, failing to shell out the bucks it would take to mount a Fox-size marketing campaign. They should be loudly promoting the pedigree: Kevin Williamson.
Williamson, who wrote the youthful soap opera “Dawson’s,” as well as the “Scream” and “I Know What you Did Last Summer” movies, has made eight episodes of “Hidden Palms” and has sketched the next 20.
“It’s such a fickle world,” he said. “I loved ‘The O.C.’ but it didn’t make 100 episodes.”
Williamson knows the key, for television especially, is inner conflict. “Everything is autobiographical, everything is fictional,” he said. While his parents always could spot themselves in the early episodes of “Dawson’s,” Williamson said, this time around, “the inner demons are all me.”
As originally written, his show was much darker. He wrote it “on spec,” with no deal in hand, before it was picked up by UPN, morphed with the WB into CW.
“I had to change some things. It wasn’t CW-friendly,” he said.
The pilot is a stunner.
The focus is Johnny Miller (Taylor Handley, formerly of “The O.C”), a happily overachieving high-school student whose world is shattered when he witnesses his father’s suicide. He numbs himself with drugs and alcohol. Out of rehab, his world is rocked again when his mother Karen (Gail O’Grady), and her new husband, Bob (D.W. Moffett) relocate the family to Palm Springs.
The ostentatious affluence and superficial perfection of Palm Springs is difficult for Johnny to endure, let alone fit into. Johnny is as ill at ease with Palm Springs country-club society as a certain working-class hero from L.A. was with the elitists of Orange County.
For “Hidden Palms,” Williamson said, “I just wanted to entertain, to create a guilty pleasure that’s also smart and articulate.”
There’s nothing novel in a soap contrasting the inner struggles of young adulthood with the sunny facades and manicured lawns of his surroundings. Johnny’s relationship to alcohol and substance abuse gives the writers new material.
“I haven’t really seen a teen character’s journey after rehab” depicted on television, Williamson said. We’ve seen alcohol and substance abuse and the downward slide to rehabilitation, but “putting a new blueprint in place for a happy life is, to me, the bigger journey.”
Visually the pilot is cinematic, engrossing. The themes, though dark, are written with pathos and humor. The cast is first-rate. Fans of “NYPD Blue” will find double reason to watch: O’Grady and Sharon Lawrence, both alums of that classic 1990s cop drama, are spectacular as Johnny’s mother and the mother of his neighbor.
The fetching girl across the street at first may be mistaken for an update on the girl across the creek Joey Potter (Katie Holmes) of “Dawson’s Creek.”
“There are the same archetypes at first glance, but I tried to quickly dispel all that,” Williamson said.
Immediately, with the father’s unnerving suicide scene, the viewer grasps that Johnny is being forced to confront “the second half of life at 16.”
Greta (Amber Heard) is the strange beauty he meets in his new neighborhood. Cliff (Michael Cassidy) is the cool, charming pal who turns out to have his own strange secrets.
Imagine couples romping in golf course sprinklers nationwide in response to the pilot.
Dark mysteries are at play. The kids are equally pleasing to look at, but it’s clear this is anything but “Dawson’s.”
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
