SERIES PREMIERE:
This is not a recommendation. CW is doing with
Nancy Drew exactly what it did with its reboot of the Archie Comics property
Riverdale. It’s populating a very small, quaint, nostalgic town with ultra-attractive young people, and moving them through a series of cartoonish, oversize plots and relationships, with a dash of dark weirdness to offset the vibrant sunny color palette. It’s like a Young Adult novel version of
Twin Peaks, or another attempt to force a square pop-culture property into a round “today’s TV” hole. Kennedy McMann plays the title character – a young mystery enthusiast with attitude and her own tiny clique. It’s a long-venerated children’s book character and series already updated for a new era, much more adeptly and successfully, with
Veronica Mars. This new
Nancy Drew series, TV’s first attempt to appropriate the book series in more than 40 years, is much too disparate, as well as desperate. And tapping into its established CW audience base, it even finds a way to inject supernatural antics into the series from the very start. It’s part Nancy Drew, part Scooby-Doo…
For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.