MTV's "reality drama" sensation Laguna Beach, which started off with the subtitle The Real Orange County and quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon at least as big as the one off of which it was piggybacking (The O.C.), has spawned its own set of imitators. Last week, MTV premiered 8th & Ocean, another reality drama about young pretty people, this one following up-and-coming models in Miami, and is set to premiere the Laguna Beach spin-off The Hills in the next few months.
Now Bravo is getting in on the act with The Real Housewives of Orange County (Tuesdays, 10 p.m.), which puts the reality drama spin on the Desperate Housewives formula. Although the show's producers manage to find an interestingly diverse cross-section of women living the upper-class subdivision of Coto de Caza, Real Housewives suffers from two obvious flaws right at the outset: Only two of the five women are actual housewives; and the producers have not quite grasped the formula that made Laguna Beach such a success.
Housewives is structured like a traditional reality show, with cast members talking directly to the camera about their lives in interviews, and a visual aesthetic that emphasizes function over style. While Laguna Beach manages to make the mundane lives of spoiled teens seem exotic and enticing, Housewives only makes the often-complex lives of its subjects into bland reality TV fodder, recycling the same endless arguments and confessionals of a thousand other shows. Worst of all, it serves as a drab counterpart to the show it's purporting to expose. The show's housewives don't appear desperate, but the producers clearly are.
Wednesday nights are about to become an even more interesting battleground on network TV than they already are, as two nets launch dramas aiming to capture the post-Lost audience. Lost's actual network, ABC, fumbles with The Evidence (10 p.m.), a bland procedural that looks like it took a wrong turn at CBS and ended up on the wrong network. The only thing that sets The Evidence apart from any of the other dozens of crime shows on the air is its titular gimmick, which shows the audience all of the evidence in a case at the top of the show. The promos want to convince you that this allows the viewer to solve the crime as the characters do, but all it really does is serve as distracting and annoying misdirection. Then again, when your show is as flavorless and boring as this one, any distraction is probably for the best.
Perhaps ABC would have been smarter to snatch up Heist (NBC, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.), since it's far more likely to appeal to the people who like Lost's intricate plotting and ongoing storylines. Like Fox's Prison Break, Heist follows the planning and execution of a single event over the course of its season; in this case it's a massive jewel heist at three stores on Rodeo Drive. The show clearly has a serious debt to slick, clever heist movies like Ocean's 11, right down to the sexual tension between the handsome leader of the criminals and the determined (but sexy) cop on their trail, with Dougray Scott as the poor man's George Clooney.
The pilot is a little too twisty for its own good, but it manages to tell a complete story while slowly forwarding the overall season arc, and introduce some intriguing, if mostly stock, characters. Heist isn't nearly as good as ABC's short-lived Karen Sisco or Eyes, both of which were better examples of the cool crime genre, but it's at least got one thing that this month's other new network dramas have lacked: promise.