Mystery Girls didn’t give the best impression when it started out but, surprisingly enough, it’s slowly starting to get better. How is that possible? Read on and find out.
I’m a big enough person to admit when I’m wrong, or in this case, when a TV show exceeds my first impressions of it. In my review of the first episode, I pointed out that I had few problems with things like the missing pilot episode and the fact that the jokes felt rushed.
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Mystery Girls finds its rhythm
Fast-forward a few episodes and it feels like the show has found its rhythm — or maybe I should say that I have found the show’s rhythm more comfortable. I’ve gotten used to Holly (Tori Spelling) being a little goofy, Charlie (Jennie Garth) being a little grumpy and Nick (Miguel Pinzon) being completely crazy — and that’s why he’s still my favorite character.
Now that we’re a couple episodes in, I’m starting to get from the show what I’d hoped for when I first heard about it. I’m not ashamed to admit that I love Tori Spelling, and the idea of her playing a character that was basically a more exaggerated version of herself was appealing. The confusion of the first episode (I’ll get back to that in a minute) threw me off and I figured the show wasn’t going to live up to my hopes. But with each joke, with each hilarious expression on Spelling’s face, it keeps winning me back over.
Forget the pilot, let’s do a flashback episode
One of the biggest problems I had with the first episode was that it was not, in fact, the first episode. ABC Family chose to air the second episode filmed as the premiere, pushing the pilot episode back a few weeks to air as the fourth episode of the season. I didn’t think there was any way that could work, but they found a pretty clever way to do it.
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The pilot episode aired on Wednesday, July 16, and with a few tweaks it was turned into a flashback that showed how the girls first got together to start their new detective agency. We got to see Holly as a former starlet dying to relive her glory days, while Charlie was a working mom just trying to live a normal life. Then Nick came into their lives and it all changed.
If someone had told me a few weeks ago that I’d be watching the pilot as Episode 4 and (gasp!) enjoy it, I would’ve asked them to take it easy on the cocktails. But enjoy it I did, and I also laughed a lot. Now that we know these characters a little better, it was fun to go back to see how they all met. Would it still have worked as the pilot episode? Perhaps, but it also worked this way as well.
So there you have it, folks. It is possible to overcome a bad first impression — it just takes some time and a few good jokes.
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