Hidden Palms (The CW, Wednesdays, 8 p.m.), the new drama from Dawson’s Creek creator Kevin Williamson, is about as far away from the Creek as possible, geographically speaking: It takes place in the desert of Palm Springs, California, clear across the country from Dawson’s Cape Cod home. But no matter how far he may try to run from the Creek, Williamson clearly can’t escape his own limitations as a writer, and the best that Palms can do is add a little of the creepiness of its creator’s film work (the Scream series, I Know What You Did Last Summer) to the tried-and-true teen-soap formula.
So our Dawson character, Johnny (Taylor Handley), is only 16 and just out of rehab, where he went after developing a drinking problem following his father’s suicide. His mother and stepfather drag him to sunny Palm Springs, where he meets a wisecracking neighbor dude whose outer joviality hides some inner torment; the nerdy girl across the way with striking beauty beneath her surface plainness; and a damaged bad girl to whom he’s immediately drawn. Sound familiar? On Dawson’s Creek, these characters were known as Pacey, Joey and Jen, and the similarities are all too easily apparent.
Williamson still writes teen dialogue in a hyper-articulate, pop-culture-meets-high-culture-obsessed manner (the first episode has references to both Pablo Neruda and Will Ferrell), and the actors struggle a bit to pull it off. Creek became such a popular target for parody that it’s easy to forget that it was entertaining and refreshing when it started out, and the return of Williamson’s style (much-copied at this point, but never really duplicated) is not entirely unwelcome.
He’s also always taken care to include adults on equal footing in his teen drama, and here the parents are as messed up as the kids. The setting, too, gets plenty of emphasis, and just as the Capeside of Dawson’s Creek was a symbol for the simplicity and wholesomeness of small-town America, here Palm Springs is used as a symbol for idleness and the decay of American values. It’s not a bad symbol, either, a little less obvious than, say, Las Vegas, and it provides a chance to check out some lovely desert vistas, to boot.
Where the show goes most wrong is in introducing a dark mystery element that seems like it was ripped out of Desperate Housewives. Jokester Cliff and bad girl Greta speak enigmatically about the final fate of Eddie, a teen who supposedly committed suicide in the very room in which Johnny now resides. It’s an unnecessary and contrived wrinkle to add to the already overwrought soapiness, which has plenty of silly twists on its own. Far more entertaining is Leslie Jordan as Johnny’s diminutive drag queen AA sponsor, who’s probably the most grounded person in all of Palm Springs.
More wackiness like that and less sinister melodrama might make Hidden Palms easier to take; with the departures of The O.C. and Veronica Mars, TV could use a good teen drama with clever writing and characters worth caring about. All Hidden Palms is going to be good for, though, is killing a few summer nights when it’s too hot to venture outside.
Hidden Palms
**1/2