Toronto pop culture, updated weekdays. scroll@eyeweekly.com
Today on the Scroll: A show called 90210 got 1.3 million Canadians to watch its premiere two-hour episode in early September — due to morbid curiosity about how aging members of its original cast might interface with a new batch of less-aging high-school students. Ten weeks later, its Canadian broadcaster Canwest wrote down the value of Global Television by one billion dollars. Just how much were they banking on the show’s Toronto-born starlet, Shenae Grimes, to do something genuinely scandalous enough to help sustain the initial high ratings? Fame was assumed to be imminent for the 19-year-old actress, drafted from Degrassi to play the role of a girl from Kansas relocated with her family to Beverly Hills. Canwest bought the rights to 90210 v.2.0 with stated hopes of making a genuine Canadian hit out of a nighttime soap relegated in the US to teen-oriented network The CW. After all, the strategy worked the first time around, right? But the convergence model of using newspapers to promote conventional television only goes so far when the audience is heeding neither.Nonetheless, a story about a young girl catapulted into celebrity was hard to resist, especially for Canwest News Service: “Toronto-born actress living it up in 90210,” read the headline on a mid-summer story by columnist Alex Strachan.“It's a big culture shock,” Grimes said. “There's no such thing as celebrity back home. Hockey players are a big deal, but actors -- I mean, I didn't get recognized in Canada very often. If I did, nobody would approach me, let alone take my picture when I wasn't looking. This whole crazy hype thing that's been going has been a little overwhelming, to say the least, but I'm just rolling with it.”And how did she cope? It’s not like there were a lack of outlets starved for detail. The best they could do for evidence was discover that she unrepentantly smokes cigarettes, possibly preferring them to solid food, especially since the groceries she was spotted buying by TMZ amounted to water, soda and paper towels.Last week, Grimes was caught by cameras exiting an appointment at Cop-A-Tan.So, just how manufactured were the gossip items that proliferated after second-week 90210 ratings dropped precipitously from the first? Show sources said Grimes was “tormenting everyone on set” and yelled at a guest star, “Who the hell are you?” She also earned a reputation for “often” spitting out comments like “This is my show – everyone else is riding my coattails.”Had these tantrums been proven true, her status as a cultural phenomenon would have been secured. But the best Grimes could do for a confession was own up to smoking: “I'm sorry if you don't like it, but this is who I am." And then it turned out that the MySpace page containing this statement was a fake. The lack of interest in her assertiveness left the producers no choice but to bring back the character that generated widespread scorn prior to the invention of the web browser: Brenda Walsh. And now, the off-screen 90210 narrative focuses on how Shannen Doherty — lured back to the show after playing West Beverly High drama teacher in the first six episodes — is training Grimes to deal with the attention, explaining to her the value of hiring a publicist, something supposedly not considered before.Rather than Canadian media running stories about how thrilled Grimes is to be in Los Angeles, the script has been flipped — the New York Post’s recent feature story, “Brenda 2.0,” was about how she’d rather be back in Toronto: “In Canada, I was a normal kid. There’s really no such thing as celebrity there.” This week, as 90210 aired its last episode before a seven-week hiatus, the Brenda character returned as their only hope for a cliffhanger. There was some sort of unresolved issue with her lifelong nemesis Kelly Taylor, the now-guidance counsellor played by Jennie Garth. Whatever the conflict, it was immediately clear in one scene that an hour of them stoically sitting across a table from one another would draw more viewers than high-school hullabaloo. Promotional shots of Brenda lying in a hospital bed surfaced in the hours leading up to the Tuesday night airing. Was her character going to die? Jason Priestley, her TV brother on tap to direct an upcoming episode, thought the idea was “awesome.” The funeral alone would draw an audience to rival the farewell episode of M*A*S*H.No such luck — what happened to Brenda is that she fell off a stage, and Kelly was the one who got the call, forcing a reconciliation. Anything more dramatic would have been an indictment of 90210’s younger stars.Given the evidence that they can no longer run their television network by gambling on contrived American trends, Global should have produced their own low-budget interpretation of 90210 — kind of like they do with Are You Smarter Than a Canadian 5th Grader? Focusing on the faded hopes and dreams of the thirtysomething cast members would’ve played better amidst the economic meltdown, and maybe even helped the stock price of Canwest.Best the company can do is tap Priestley to host the Gemini Awards on Nov. 28, the annual televised event that struggles to throw tinsel at the Canadian television industry, even if it gets swept up the next morning. And nominated for a viewers’ choice award for Hottest Canadian Female TV Star is the most famous person they could get to turn out: Shenae Grimes.
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