‘Sunset Beach’ So Bad, It’s Entertaining
“Sunset Beach” is stunningly vacuous, even by the notoriously limited standards of daytime television. It’s IQ-impaired, even compared with other lowbrow Aaron Spelling productions: “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Melrose Place,” Dynasty,” “Savannah” and, of course, the classic “Charlie’s Angels.”
Still, the two-week-old “Sunset Beach” (which airs weekdays at 1:30 p.m. on KHQ-6 in Spokane) is almost guaranteed a loyal audience. The first new daytime serial in nearly eight years brings a whiff of novelty into a time period cluttered with tired soap operas and “I-Married-My-Mom” chat shows.
“Sunset Beach” is comically bad, with a script loaded with lame, unintentional one-liners. There must be something amiss at the House of Spelling, possibly a cash-flow crunch that diverted money from the scriptwriting budget to pay for hair gel, sunblock and other essential unguents.
The characters seem stolen from rejected romance novels. Witness the adventures of Meg Cummings, the headstrong lass who left Kansas for the fictional California town of Sunset Beach to match a face and body with the initials of her on-line lover, a mystery man who just could be Ben Evans, a dashing entrepreneur haunted both by inner demons and by a libidinous next-door neighbor, Annie Douglas, who wants to bed Ben almost as much as she wants to kill her father, Del Douglas, a silver-haired knave entangled with Olivia Richards, the high-maintenance spouse of high-powered attorney, Gregory Richards … and so on.
Several dozen other fabulously beautiful people waltz through this tableau of sun, sex and sand. Several competent actors are among them - Lesley-Anne Down, veteran soap stars Kathleen Noone and Sam Behrens - but most are either drama-school runaways or endowed only with good genes and buff bodies.
Most of the men seem forgetful, prone to misplacing their shirts at all hours of the day. Some of the women appear just as predisposed to fashion faux pas as the men; certainly Miss Manners would not approve of wearing a lacy peignoir to pay a social call on a friend.
There are truly beautiful people on Spelling’s payroll; apparently, if Spelling couldn’t have the best soap, he was determined to have the best-looking one. Several former beauty queens and a smattering of successful models, both male and female, are part of the scene.
For added star-name value, he has Ashley Hamilton, son of George Hamilton and Alana Stewart, stepson of rocker Rod Stewart and ex-husband of former “Beverly Hills 90210” star Shannen Doherty. There’s also another mouthbreathing Spelling progeny, son Randy, who, like big sister Tori, is using Daddy’s TV shows for on-the-job acting training.
It’s a wonder that “Sunset Beach” doesn’t implode: the walls, characters and cheesy sets (the cyber-coffeehouse thing is so 1995) collapsing violently toward the void at its center.