'Melrose Place' reboot: Worth your time or not?

Empty calories.

That's what the remake of "Melrose Place" (8 p.m. Central Tuesday, WGN-Ch. 9; two stars) is -- it's the TV equivalent of snack food that doesn't really fill you up.

Now, don't think I'm dissing the idea of indulging in non-nutritious fare. The desire to revel in derivative melodrama starring pretty people is nothing to be ashamed of. And the new cast of "Melrose Place" is indeed good-looking. The problem is, very few of these actors -- or characters -- are memorable.  



It's not uncommon for designers on "Project Runway" to slap together a not-particularly-original garment and hope that the model "works" the dress on the catwalk in such a fierce way that the look somehow wows the judges (or at least escapes their ire).

Katie Cassidy ("Supernatural," "Harper's Island") works the hell out of her "Melrose" role, sarcastic junior PR executive Ella, the resident rhymes-with-rich of the Melrose Place apartment complex. Ella nurses a secret crush on another resident, who is dating another resident, and so on and so forth -- but nobody's love life is more complex than that of everyone's landlady, Sydney (Laura Leighton).

Yes, that Sydney, from the original "Melrose Place." (And if you're asking how she can be alive in this "Melrose" after being killed in the original show, you're thinking way too hard about this shiny slice of escapism.)

Sydney's shenanigans drive much of the first two episodes, and there's a certain soapy pleasure in getting tangled up in the vixenish doings of both Sydney and Ella; the show certainly crackles when the latter is on screen.

Trouble is, very few of the show's other cast members make much of an impression, aside from Cassidy and Stephanie Jacobsen, whose medical-student plot is lifted straight from the Soap 101 handbook. On the other end of the talent scale, as Los Angeles newcomer Violet, Ashlee Simpson-Wentz simply stops the show cold every time she says a line.

There's a mystery to be solved in the first batch of episodes, and that thread might be the one thing that causes me to tune in to the reboot on occasion -- maybe. Given that I was never a big fan of the original "Melrose," which ran on Fox 1992-'99, I can't say whether this one is better or worse. I just know that in a fall season that's about to get very crowded indeed, this remake will have to work harder than this to keep my attention.