Surviving the Filthy Rich

Pilot screeners are starting to roll in! I'm so happy......!!!!

Surviving the Filthy Rich, CW Pilot Presentation (it's about 30 minutes of the "key scenes", isn't the whole story but since it's been picked up, the rest is going to be shot... though I've read the script so I know what was missing). It will air Tuesdays at 9pm.

General story: Yale graduate works for crappy tabloid-ish magazine in NYC, wants to write about things and people that matter. Her apartment gets burned down and she doesn't get a promotion to be a full-time writer at the magazine she doesn't want to work at anyway, and through a lucky connection, is sent to Palm Beach (where she happened to grow up) to be a stay-at-home tutor to two pretty, immensely wealthy spoiled sixteen year old girls who live with their grandmother because their parents both died. The plot, as you'd expect, rotates around the main character liking/not liking her job, and the trials and tribulations put in front of her so that she earns keeping the job, and thus we have a series.

Here's the thing about this presentation... it's almost completely, and woefully miscast. The lead, JoAnna Garcia is the best of everyone. Considering I disliked the script, she did an good job making me sympathetic towards her character, Megan. Lucy Kate Hale plays Rose, the seemingly less evil of the evil twins. I saw keep her. Unfortunately, I think everyone else must go. Ashley Newbrough just does not work as well as Hale does in her role as Sage, the bitchier, evilier, more out-to-get-Megan-ier role. Plus they don't look like twins (yes, yes, fraternal twins, blah blah... still, family resemblance isn't working for me). Marsha Mason is woefully Laura Bush-ian in her role as Laurel, the grandmother (OMG IS THERE A THEME TO THE NAMES!?) and Michael Cassidy is painfully bland as Megan's best friend (who we meet in video chat before her NYC apartment burns down and then find him waiting tables in Florida). Not cast yet from the script are Megan's sister, and her boyfriend who happens to live next door to Megan's new home and has caught Megan's eye (oh, sigh, love quadrangle, sigh).

As in the script, there is an atrocious "let's do something insane just so we have a series" moment (the day after Megan gets fired and then tells Sage off in front of Laurel and storms out, then she wakes up to find out she is no longer fired) where Laurel, of her own free will, draws up a contract that says that she can't fire Megan for 6 months, or Megan can sue Lauren for all she's worth (and, it is noted, she is worth a considerable sum). Um... okay...

Anyway... I'm not sure who, precisely, the audience for this show is. Yes, it has the trappings of a younger female oriented soap (though post-college), and it attempts to paint the "filthy rich" in both impossibly terrible and endearingly vulnerable lights (except Sage). But there's just something not quite right with it. Probably has to do with my problems with the cast.

Next: CBS' "Worst Week"