You have to give Fox credit where it's due, and it's due for "Reunion,” a series that attempts to weave together threads of disparate hot TV series to create something quite original. Put simply, and perhaps way too nicely, "Reunion" reaches too far. In its innovative weaving, it sacrifices such traditional storytelling concerns as plausibility and credible characters.
    What we end up with is a mess on the floor, and a laughable one.
   "Reunion” cross-cuts between the lives of six privileged, small-town high school friends in 1986 and the killing of one in the present day. There are three boys, three girls. Each episode will carry those teens one year closer to their 20th reunion, along the way revealing which one was murdered and why.
   But in rolling out this already complicated storyline, "Reunion” melds plot twists from elimination-round reality shows, the “Veronica Mars’” season-long murder-mystery format, and Fox's own teen melodrama, "The O.C."
   The editing transitions are smooth and smart, giving the show a gleaming and sophisticated surface. But writer/executive producer Jon Harmon Feldman fails to deliver a story that comes anywhere close to realizing "Reunion's” grand ambitions. "Reunion” never rises above hoary, derivatively predictable teen-drama clichés. 
   No less troubling is the poor execution of the often tangled plot devices. The viewer is bounced back and forth between decades, and as the story unfolds some things are revealed while others are kept hidden. But it's all handled very poorly, leading to excessive head-scratching on the part of the viewer. 
   These ills become apparent with the opening scene, a funeral service set in the present. One mourner says, speaking to the assembled: “I never would have thought one of these six friends would have been brutally murdered by an unknown assailant.” 
   Notice here, no name. We don't even learn the victim's gender. Who ever heard of a funeral oration in which the departed one's name is never mentioned?
   Similarly, a police detective (“Six Feet Under’s” Mathew St. Patrick) assigned to the case conducts his interviews without mentioning the victim's name. 
   Apparently the identity of the deceased will be revealed in the sixth episode. Until then, presumably, the survivors will be revealed one by one. 
   The first episode focuses on the first survivor, Carla (Chyler Leigh). She’s a sweet, pixyish girl-next-door in the 1986 flashbacks, like Kate Jackson in “Charlie’s Angels.” But in the present day she is shown to be a cynical, heavy-smoking femme fatale, as we learn during an interview with the equally hardened cop. It's a belabored transformation.
   The scenes set in 1986 come off equally badly. For all the intrigue of the storyline, we never meet characters who are the least bit engaging or admirable or worth identifying with.
   We have smug rich boy Craig (Sean Faris, looking like a young Tom Cruise) toasting his friends after graduation: “May everything always stay as perfect as it is now.” Then he gets drunk and crashes his red Porsche into a pickup and kills the other driver.
   Craig then connives to have his best friend Will (Will Estes) take the rap. Will agrees to do so for a variety of reasons. He's more expendable (not as rich) and he feels guilty about having slept with Craig’s sensuous girlfriend Samantha (Alexa Davalos). Craig’s smarmy father works to have a lawyer get Will off with probation.
   But through all this the other close friends seem oddly preoccupied. Carla spends much time encouraging the secretly pregnant Samantha to keep her baby, and we learn that she has a secret crush on geeky Aaron (Dave Annable). We listen to Aaron predicting that Wham! will be bigger than the Beatles, and we also learn that Aaron has a  crush on sex goddess Jenna (Amanda Righetti), who often treats him like dirt.
   Do we care? No.
   The characters are so cloistered in their TV-fake world of self-absorption that nobody seems to really care that the car crash killed a human being. Someone was left dead on the highway. 
   As a result, “Reunion” never feels like life as experienced by real teens. It fails as storytelling when it's set in 1986, and it fails in the present. We have a dead body, one of six friends, but it doesn't really matter much who the victim was, or why that person was murdered. Because as characters, all the characters of “Reunion” are dead.