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use a bit of deviltry ABC dramedy based on the Updike novel falls flat Oct 14, 2009
“Eastwick” has that problem. The new comedy-drama, airing on ABC on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. and based on John Updike’s novel “The Witches of Eastwick,” which inspired the 1987 movie of the same name, concerns the troubles of three women living in the titular New England village. Kat (Jaime Ray Newman) is a working mother trying to get a divorce from her lowlife husband (Jon Bernthal). Joanna (Lindsay Price) is an ambitious newspaper reporter who is about to start dating her longtime crush, Will (Johann Urb). And Roxie (Rebecca Romijn) is a widowed sculptor who is inching closer to consummating her flirtation with a rich newcomer, Darryl Van Horn (Paul Gross). All three of the women have recently acquired magical abilities, which may have something to do with the appearance of Darryl, a shady entrepreneur who has already closed some probably corrupt deals with the town government. Though the three female leads have the same hair-color range as the three lead actresses in the movie version—Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer—their character names are different, so they avoid any invidious comparisons. The actresses do fine with what they’re given, but the script lets them down. Kat is nondescript. Joanna is one of the oldest clichés in motion pictures: the uptight girl with glasses and pulled-back hair who transforms into a gorgeous seductress when the glasses come off and the hair comes down. Rebecca Romijn, whose acting has improved greatly since “Pepper Dennis,” is stuck playing a relatively new cliché, the bawdy, hard-drinking single mother with a repressed, level-headed daughter. Paul Gross, who was appealing as the straight-arrow Mountie in the fish-out-of-water dramedy “Due South,” is stuck with a task that no actor would envy, playing a role that Jack Nicholson had first. Though Gross does his best to grin devilishly, Nicholson showed more charisma and wicked glee in the movie’s trailer than Gross has in three episodes. Again, Gross gets little help from the script. When a remorseful Roxie says to him, “I’m going to hell, aren’t I?” he replies, “I can think of worse places to spend eternity—Los Angeles, for instance.” Too many of the jokes are coarse without being funny or even particularly outrageous. If you take away the supernatural angle, many of the plotlines could have been borrowed from “Desperate Housewives,” where they would have been done better. Occasionally the series seems to be trying to send a feminist message, but it’s hardly novel or insightful: Women are awesome. Agreed. Too bad “Eastwick” isn’t.
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