Entertainment

TV review: ‘Mystery Girls’ is bottom-of-the-barrel summer filler

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Oh, Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling — THIS is what you came back to TV for?

One star

Mystery Girls Wednesdays, 8:30 p.m., ABC Family.

Like a BuzzFeed listicle turned into a sitcom, Mystery Girls exists solely to drop weak ’90s-related pop-culture references, the biggest of which is its reteaming of former Beverly Hills, 90210 co-stars Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling as … the former co-stars of a ’90s TV series. Charlie (Garth) and Holly (Spelling, also the show’s co-creator) once played the lead roles on the detective show Mystery Girls, and now they’ve teamed up to solve mysteries in real life. This is an ABC Family sitcom, though, so the mystery-solving is perfunctory at best, merely the vehicle for terrible puns, hammy performances (Spelling may be the worst actress on TV) and a grating laugh track. Like all ABC Family sitcoms, Mystery Girls seems to have been imported from an alternate-universe version of ABC’s old TGIF lineup, a product of—you guessed it—the ’90s. Can’t we have nostalgia for stuff that was actually good to begin with?

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