Illustration by Kyle T. Webster.

A few weeks before the premiere of The Carrie Diaries on The CW, The Observer drove to Connecticut to meet the “real Carrie Bradshaw,” who now lives by herself on a small farm with two large poodles.

Candace Bushnell is not an easy woman to find. After several wrong turns on a chilly, overcast Tuesday, we found ourselves driving up a small dirt road in the middle of nowhere (technically, Roxbury, Conn.). A sharp right, and we were in the gravel driveway of what appeared to be a steeply pitched farmhouse. In a puffy blue parka, bomber hat yanked over her ears, the slight blond figure bounded down the steps of the barn, calling away her dogs and exhorting us to park somewhere else so she could get her car out. She seemed so unnerved by our arrival that we weren’t even sure she was the woman behind the cultural juggernaut Sex and the City.

“I’m one of those people who don’t get lonely,” Ms. Bushnell, 54, told The Observer later in the afternoon. “I like being alone. I write and I read. I’m not interrupted. Friends live nearby.” She’s taken up dressage riding at a nearby stable, which houses her German Warmblood, Mr. Winters.

There was a time when Ms. Bushnell more closely resembled her famed alter-ego. Raised in Connecticut, an hour away from her current home, she arrived in New York, arms open, after selling a children’s book to Simon & Schuster at age 19.

“I would literally go up to people and say, ‘I’m a writer. Can I write something for you?’” She remembered. “I wrote for this paper called Night Magazine, which was mainly just a bunch of pictures of people at Studio 54. I would do little interviews and profiles.”

Ms. Bushnell’s darkly satirical 'Sex and the City' columns, written for this newspaper when she was in her 30s and already established, read more like the savage humor of her friends Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis than those fictional musings of Ms. Bradshaw. Still, it was easy to confuse Carrie and Candace. They both had Mr. Bigs. They had friends named Miranda and Samantha. They were smart, savvy and knew everybody. If the ’90s in New York had to take on a single voice, Bushnell-as-Bradshaw was as good an option as any.

But at some point—around the time her show became a hit, it seems—the personalities split. Ms. Bushnell retreated. Asked if it was strange to see her creation become such a cultural touchstone, the writer shrugged. “I was traveling a lot when that happened,” she said vaguely.

Carrie Bradshaw, however, never left New York (except for that one time she went to the Middle East). Her legacy lives on in anyone who has ever smoked a cigarette in a Patricia Field knockoff and blogged about guys. Her apparition hovers over every “girlfriend brunch.” Her spirit possesses every college girl who still clutches onto her identity by declaring that she is “totally a Carrie!” (Or a Samantha, depending on the time of night.) She does not age, lose her New York celebrity status or suffer the effects of a recession and a media winter.

And thanks to Candace Bushnell and HBO, we can still fantasize about being Carrie Bradshaw, even when the real Carrie Bradshaw no longer does.

Despite leaving us with the taste of its terrible big-screen sequel film in our mouths, the SATC franchise fantasy is as strong as ever. Not only in The Carrie Diaries, a high school prequel which premieres next Monday on The CW, but in HBO’s show about four women—headed by a self-obsessed writer—trying to make it New York.

Before the first season of Girls had even premiered, creator/writer/producer/actress Lena Dunham was forced to answer for the show’s Sex and the City-ness. Despite the unending, indistinguishable line of quirky detectives who live on USA, and despite HBO/AMC/Showtime’s boundless well of misanthropic and misogynistic anti-heroes (Walter White, Rick Grimes, Tony Soprano, Dexter, Don Draper, etc., etc.), it was implausible—nay, impossible!—that there could be a second popular show about women, sex and urban life.

Rather than bristle, Ms. Dunham embraced the comparisons. As she told Laura Sullivan on All Things Considered, Girls owed a lot to the series, “not only because [Sex and the City] carved the space for women,” but because “the girls this show is about probably moved to New York three-quarters because they watched a Sex and the City marathon and thought, like, ‘I want me a piece of that.’”

Since similarities were inevitably drawn even before the cameras rolled, Girls set about in its premiere episode to prove that it existed in a post-Bradshaw world. In the pilot, flaky NYU student Shoshanna Shapiro was exactly the kind of young woman Ms. Dunham had described; a SATC obsessive whose dorm room was plastered with posters for the film Sex and the City ... arguably the furthest, most consumer-warped product to come from the original Bushnell series.

With that wincingly painful lack of self-awareness that would go on to define the show’s unique tone, Shoshanna described her cousin as “a Carrie, but with some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair. That’s like, a really good combination.” She continued, oblivious to her cousin’s (and the audience’s) dismay, “I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes? Sometimes my Samantha side comes out. And then when I’m at school, I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat.”

Girls wasn’t about to mock Sex and the City—the way 30 Rock once did, with Liz Lemon telling four lookalikes, “SHUT UP! That’s horrible!”—but it wasn’t above savaging the very-real stereotype of women who still walk around trying to find their identities in four characters who haven’t been on television for almost a decade.

So why are the women of Sex and the City so ingrained in the city’s cultural subconscious and stamped indelibly on its soul?

Maybe it’s an age thing. Sex and the City certainly did provide role models for young women who grew up believing that becoming a glamorous, famous writer was as easy as moving to New York and finding three friends with different hair colors. Just as plucky Mary Tyler Moore did generations before, Sex and the City proved that we all were “gonna make it after all.”

The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana began her career by following in Ms. Bushnell’s footsteps, becoming a society writer for The Observer directly out of college. More than once, she wrote about her mixed feelings toward the franchise.

I started watching the series as a wide-eyed Pittsburgh teenager and was quickly seduced by the whole fantasy. Carrie Bradshaw became a totem in my life, a lure to the city so powerful that I’m now embarrassed to think about it.

After growing up on a diet of SATC, is it any wonder that young women like Ms. Dana and Ms. Dunham are still reflecting and refracting a cultural zeitgeist that no longer exists?

Because there are no two ways about it: the New York of Carrie Bradshaw and the gang is gone. It was pre-recession programming, and the signs of excess wealth—the shoes, the clothes, the endless parties, cabs and brunches—were everywhere. Even if out of our immediate grasp, that lifestyle seemed within reach. Somehow, we were convinced that a woman working off of Carrie Bradshaw’s salary as a columnist (as she started out) would be able to stock a closet with Manolos in her Manhattan apartment.

But today? Forget about it. It’s impossible to give voice to your secret Carrie aspirations—or, even worse, socialite Charlotte—without immediately feeling like kind of an asshole.

With the second season of Girls premiering one day before The Carrie Diaries, it’s doubtful anyone is still comparing the dark, unredemptive, messy tone of Ms. Dunham’s creation to the chirpy, pun-obsessed world of Sex and the City. As Peter Stevenson, who edited “Sex and the City” at The Observer, told us, “Girls makes SATC look like Downton Abbey.” It was as much an iconic snapshot of New York in the ’90s as Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street were of the ’80s.

And that’s how we arrive at The Carrie Diaries. Stuck in its era and unable to move forward without drastically changing its protagonist’s lifestyle, the SATC franchise had to rewind. The show, based on Bushnell’s 2010 book, takes place before Bradshaw ever moved to the city and scavenges the picked-over bones of ’80s nostalgia to bring us the story of Carrie’s formative years.

The “origin story” idea doesn’t really work. The show so clumsily belabors its ’80s milieu that episodes have more pop-culture references than a VH1 flashback. (Space Invaders! Madonna! Interview magazine!) And woof, the early-Bradshaw metaphors: “It’s then that I had the realization that I had just lost my innocence, my virginity. And not to the guy I had hoped, but a different man. Manhattan.”

It’s not a bad show—its premiere showed promising chemistry, and AnnaSophia Robb does a serviceable pre-Sex-Bradshaw. But maybe actress Freema Agyeman, who spoke on the red carpet during the New York Television Festival, said it best: “The best part is the fun costumes!”

“I know some people think it’s a cynical move,” showrunner Amy B. Harris told The Observer by phone. “‘Oh it’s a franchise, you’re just trying to wring some more money out if it.’ But this is a time of my life I feel so strongly about, it was my life. My hope is that women will want to go back to their experience.”
Ms. Harris recognized the irony of The Carrie Diaries now competing with a show like Girls for an audience. “Lena told me Girls wouldn’t exist without SATC,” she said. “I’m totally prepared for the comparison, but I would be lying to say it wasn’t a concern. I hope people will stay with [The Carrie Diaries] because they feel like its their own.”

Ms. Bushnell herself might not be among them. “I really relate to Girls,” she told us. “I feel like it’s what my 20s were like.”

A common theme in The Carrie Diaries and Summer and the City (Ms. Bushnell’s sequel-to-the-prequel novel) as well as the author’s own self-narrative is the conviction that one could come to New York and make it as a famous writer. Not out of sheer willpower or hard work, but because of destiny.

“I do think there’s something in people’s DNA,” Ms. Bushnell pondered while we made some coffee and settled in. “The decision to leave your small town and leave your city, that’s a certain type of person.”

By way of explanation, Ms. Bushnell asked us to consider the lowly ant: most of them, she said, lived and worked in the colony. “But the colony would die if there weren’t ants that ventured outside their little box,” she said. “The human population would either die or be living in a dark age if some people—the right ones—didn’t move to big metropolitan areas and bring us all culture.”

This is not the story, of course, provided in the TV show The Carrie Diaries. If anything, that “certain type of person” that Ms. Bushnell described was Lena Dunham’s stubborn Hannah Horvath, who moves to Brooklyn from Michigan and founders in underemployment. Much like Ms. Bushnell, Hannah has minimally tried her hands in other types of work, but is convinced that her path is that of a writer. Specifically, one who only writes about her own life. She’s “a voice! Of a generation!”

Too bad Carrie Bradshaw has already claimed the title as the voice of every generation. About as far away from a banquette at Moomba as one can get, Ms. Bushnell acknowledged the grip her creation still holds on American culture. “Of course they’re saying Girls is like Sex and the City,” she said dryly. “It’s a TV show involving women.”

AnnaSophia Robb as "Carrie."

The Carrie Diaries, the struggling-upward-teen-in-New-York Sex and the City prequel, is taking the Monday 8 p.m. time slot of the wealthy-teens-in-New-York soap Gossip Girl, once that show goes off-air at the end of the year.

Diaries and its time slot predecessor share executive producers in the form of Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, but hopefully the new show will burn off its buzz a bit less quickly than did the ratings mayfly that was Gossip Girl. We'll find out beginning Monday, January 14.

Entertainment Weekly has the photographic evidence. Here's the offending ad, in all its glory.

The CW flack has this to say: "VD simply stands for Vampire Diaries, and anyone who thinks otherwise should probably get themselves checked out."

The Observer has this to say: Yeah right! It seems impossible that the execs didn't know the implications here -- especially given that it was The CW who plastered New York with the famous OMFG "Gossip Girl" ads. These posters would couple a damning quote about the show -- "Mind-blowingly inappropriate!" said the Parents Television Council -- with a picture of the beautiful cast members naked and sucking face. They were so incredibly awesome. So we have no problem with these "Catch VD" posters -- it's good, flashy, conversation-starting ad copy.

And, hey, it's working. We acknowledged this show's existence for the first time! Expect a ratings boost.

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

On the low ratings for The CW programs

Ostroff says: "The days of waking up and looking at the overnight ratings are gone."

Ostroff means: We're The CW! It doesn't matter if Gossip Girl gets ratings comparable to shows on AMC and HBO -- as long as its cast still features heavily in magazines and on blogs, we're golden. It's the illusion of success that counts.

On the lack of comedies on The CW

Ostroff says: "We don't really develop comedies."

Ostroff means: Comedy comes naturally to our existing shows. Have you seen an episode of Gossip Girl lately? It's a laugh riot.

On the evolution of how viewers watch TV

Ostroff says: "Our young viewers are the first to migrate to other platforms."

Ostroff means: The days of people watching television are just about over. Weep for the death of the medium.

On new series, Nikita, a spy-drama based on La Femme Nikita

Ostroff says: "The writing was very strong. Danny Cannon did an amazing job directing the show. McG is one of the producers. It was just an incredible package."

Ostroff means: This is what being a television executive in 2010 means: You have to say something with McG's named on it is "incredible."

This was the way stewardesses (back when they could still be called that) used to appear: beautiful, independent girls with college educations who were carefully selected to “host” the sort of passengers that had reason to fly and could afford it. There was a titillating factor, naturally, to having a pretty girl in uniform bring you a stiff cocktail. In A Big Life in Advertising, Mary Wells Lawrence, the advertising exec who devised “The End of the Plain Plane” campaign for now-defunct Braniff, described the airline’s stewardesses after Emilio Pucci put them in his colorful designs: “It was wonderful to watch Braniff’s hostesses feel so beautiful and begin to walk like models, one foot in front of the other, tra-la-la, on the planes.”

Flying hasn’t been sexy like that for a long time. It is difficult to remember the last time a flight attendant elicited anything but pity—the grueling schedules and security requirements, the bickering with passengers over luggage, the sad cans of sugary soda and stale crackers they serve, demanding small bills for headsets and pillows. (This is true even on Virgin America, which this reporter flew to Los Angeles a few weeks ago.)

But almost a decade after 9/11 played out our worst fears about flying, there are signs that the romance is resurgent. It began, perhaps, with Captain Chesley Sullenberger (“Sully”), who landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson last year and subsequently told Matt Lauer that this act of heroism led to “rock star sex” (with his wife of 20 years). Mad Men writers began and ended their blockbuster third season with the main characters escaping stuffy suburban domesticity on planes, and The Bachelor this season is a square-jawed pilot in uniform. Up in the Air, the feature film by Jason Reitman adapted from the 2001 novel by Walter Kirn, is up for six Oscars this Sunday.

Back in real life, there is the much anticipated 787 Dreamliner, the name conjuring all the excitement of the 1950s, a fuel-efficient plane with a sleek design and roomy seats, expected to start flying later this year. Even JetBlue, which had suffered in the public imagination in recent years thanks to twisted landing gear and mismanaged delays, has spiffed up with its futuristic J.F.K. terminal, home to manicures, hip restaurants and supersonic Internet access.

As for Fly Girls, it’s two parts MTV’s The Hills (executive producer Colin Nash worked on both) and one part Bravo’s Real Housewives. In the opening, a 26-year-old named Mandalay, the youngest and cutest of the girls, tells her story: “Back in Arizona, I was destined for the white-picket-fence life of settling down, getting married and having kids, but I knew that wasn’t for me... Now I’m in control of my own destiny.”

SLIDESHOW: Flight Attendant Fashions Through the Ages >

The other day, Mandy and her colleagues met The Observer at the London Hotel in midtown to sell us on the concept of the new glam skies. They arrived wearing their uniforms. At the behest of the network? “For now we do, yes,” sighed Louise, who is 28 and from Los Angeles, before catching herself. “But, you know, we have to feel sexy in whatever we wear.”

In the first episode, Louise meets a gentleman on a plane whom the girls refer to, giggling, as her “IFB” (in-flight boyfriend). “Usually, he’s also an ABP, an able-bodied person,” said Mandy, meaning he could sit in the exit row.

“But ‘in-flight boyfriend’ can also just mean any person you connect with,” said Nikole, a 31-year-old brunette from Sacramento who is cast as the villain on the show. “It could be the guy in 13A that you just laugh with the whole time, so even if I have a boyfriend, my in-flight boyfriend is my boyfriend for the flight.”

Farrah, 33, who has a childlike coo to her voice, put in that it is possible to meet an in-life boyfriend in addition to an in-flight one. “If you’re open to meeting people and going on dates, then it happens sometimes,” she said. Sleeping with the flight attendant is a fantasy that still exists, they all agreed. “Sometimes, it’s blatantly obvious,” said Louise, rolling her eyes.

“But it’s really guys and girls who have fantasies about flight attendants,” Nikole said. “Women always say, ‘When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a flight attendant before I got married and had kids.’”

The Fly Girls agreed that they wish they could still be called stewardesses, with the exception of Tasha, a 28-year-old from Sacramento, whose objection was not that it was offensive, but that the word felt too old.

“I feel like ‘stewardess’ was when people dressed up to go on a plane and drinks were served,” Mandy disagreed. “It’s the romance of flying.”

With the maximized number of seats and the minimized personal space, the constant terror threat and minor technical difficulties that always feel like terror but inevitably turn out to be the result of cutbacks and neglected aircraft—could the thrill ever return?

“Air travel has got an erotic component that’s underappreciated,” Mr. Kirn suggested by phone as he was traveling (by train) from D.C. to New York last week. “I mean, c’mon, strangers are sitting very close to each other in an environment in which they could potentially end up dying, so it’s got that wartime romance charge to it, and they are taking time out from their lives, so they get to try on other selves. It should be one of the most erotic experiences available—at least as much as going to Whole Foods and sitting alone at the herbal tea bar. And you’re in a fast, phallic machine, dammit!”

The author paid attention to flight attendants while working on his book and still does, he said. “Lately, I’ve actually noticed among flight attendants, male and female, a little bit more flamboyance and fun with the job than I was seeing five or six years ago,” he said. “I think in the way Mad Men has made us conscious of an earlier, slightly more dangerous, stimulating age of business, flight attendants have become self-conscious and said, ‘Hey, wait! We used to be sex symbols, and the men used to be maitre d’s of the sky.’ So I think we’ve been coming to this point.”

Mr. Kirn suggested that flights should be like international ocean voyages, with legalized gambling and a pornography section for those who qualify. “And you should be able to Facebook-poke your fellow passengers. Like, ‘Hey, 4B! Nice hair. Turn around, let’s see what the rest of you looks like.’ I think Branson is right, let’s bring a little bit of the libido back to flying.”

Sir Richard Branson, who lent his company and himself to the show—he appears in the first episode hosing down a Virgin America plane from a fire truck with Fly Girl Nikole—had an entirely sensible and not uncommon reason for forging a partnership with the CW, whose past forays into the medium include Beauty and the Geek and a competition-based show featuring the Pussycat Dolls. “We can’t afford national ad campaigns, so this could grow awareness of the Virgin brand,” he said. (Despite being Mr. Branson’s creation, the airline is actually controlled by VIA Partners LLC due to a law prohibiting more than 25 percent of any U.S. airline to be controlled by foreign interests.)

This was his primary reason, he said, but there was also something that had been bugging Mr. Branson about today’s in-flight staff. “They sort of dump a slab of cold chicken on your lap if you’re lucky, and this was particular in America,” he said. “I think the unique kerfuffles that have gone on in America, it’s a whole industry that spiraled down, and it’s very sad because most American industries are great.”

Mr. Branson’s transatlantic airline offers passengers massages, a shoe-shining service, hair dressers and in-flight bars for mingling during the flight. “I have the picture of the world’s first stewardess here in the pressurized plane, and it’s a glamorous picture. I expect that’s rubbed off on me somewhat,” he said.

For a firsthand account of that era, The Observer tracked down Bronwen Roberts, a Pan Am flight attendant from 1958 to 1989. She was hired in London, one of three or four girls chosen from some 5,000 applicants. She attended Winston Churchill the only time he flew Pan Am, serving him cigars and cognac. She made scrambled eggs to order and sliced roast beef in the aisle for Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn and Robert Taylor. “By the time I quit, I had had it, it was all downhill from there,” she said from her Forest Hills apartment. “I just got tired of apologizing to passengers.”

Ms. Roberts believes the Golden Age of Flying is gone forever. “We wore gloves and hats,” she said. “Now I see girls with long hair draping all over their shoulders. We had weigh-ins, and if you were too heavy, you were taken off the plane. Now I see these women and they’re huge! They can barely get down the aisle.”

And Gary Cole, a photography director at Playboy who worked on the magazine’s stewardess spreads in the ’70s and ’80s, said it was difficult to imagine re-creating them. “I don’t know that flight attendants have that same thing anymore,” said Mr. Cole. “I know as a man I don’t view them the same. Flight attendants now are heavier and older, and that’s all fine, it really is and it should be, but it has changed the way we think about them. It’s possible making a show like this might help that along, but working against that is everybody’s common experience on the airlines, which is so far from that.”

Back at the London Hotel, though, Mandy was brimming with optimism about her show and what she argued was a revitalized workplace. “The airports just seem fuller to me,” she said. The girls told a story of how their passengers have been chatting via the seat-to-seat chat on their screens and sending drinks to one another. Two passengers, Mandy bragged, even got engaged.

SLIDESHOW: Flight Attendant Fashions Through the Ages >

The Jet Set: Our Favorite Boutique Airlines, Past and Present >

ialeksander@observer.com

If there is a silver lining to be found in the end of the summertime—not counting the ever-increasing likelihood that we’ll all get the swine flu—it’s that we are on the precipice of the fall television season. Thank goodness. In an effort to get you and your DVR prepared, here’s The Observer’s fall TV preview. We’ve already covered CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC. Finally, here’st CW!

Melrose Place (Tuesdays at 9 p.m., premieres September 8)

What the CW says: “In an elegant Spanish-style apartment building in the trendy Melrose neighborhood of Los Angeles, a diverse group of 20-somethings have formed a close-knit surrogate family. When a bloody body is found floating in the courtyard pool, the police are soon to discover, almost everyone living at Melrose Place had a reason to want the deceased out of the way.”

What we say: Because suffering through the indignities that were the first season of the CW’s 90210 reboot weren’t quite terrible enough, here comes a reboot of Melrose Place. We won’t spoil who that floating dead body is, but know it’s one of the original characters (Hint: rhymes with Mindy). As for the series itself, if it’s anything like the billboards for the show that are plastered around the city—“Ménage a Tues,” “Tuesdays are the New Hump Day”—we’re not expecting much.

What we’ll say six months from now: “That 90210/Melrose Place crossover episode was fairly disappointing.”

The Beautiful Life (Wednesdays at 9 p.m., premieres September 16)

What the CW says: “The life of a high-fashion model appears glamorous and sexy, but as every new model quickly learns, behind the beauty is a world of insecurity and cutthroat competition.”

What we say: From executive producer Ashton Kutcher, The Beautiful Life promises to be a fictionalized version of Project Runway, or, perhaps, All About Eve with models. Whatever. We’re just interested to see if former O.C. star Mischa Barton can make it through the first season without being fired and/or going into rehab.

What we’ll say six months from now: “Why hasn’t anyone given Rachel Bilson her own series?”

The Vampire Diaries (Thursdays at 8 p.m., premieres September 10)

What the CW says: “Four months after the tragic car accident that killed their parents, 17-year-old Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev, DeGrassi: The Next Generation) and her 15-year-old brother, Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen, Everwood) are still trying to cope with their grief and move on with their lives. Elena has always been the star student; beautiful, popular and involved with school and friends, but now she finds herself struggling to hide her sadness from the world. As the school year begins, Elena and her friends are fascinated by a handsome and mysterious new student, Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley, Army Wives). Stefan and Elena are immediately drawn to one another, and Elena has no way of knowing that Stefan is a centuries-old vampire, struggling to live peacefully among humans, while his brother Damon (Ian Somerhalder, Lost) is the embodiment of vampire violence and brutality.”

What we say: If you can’t wait until New Moon hits theaters in November, then this is the series for you! The Vampire Diaries has a chance to be a solid hit for The CW, if for no other reason than vampires are so hot right now. However, that Lost alum Ian Somerhalder and his doppelgänger Chace Crawford are now both calling the same network home is probably yet another sign of the coming apocalypse.

What we’ll say six months from now: “OMG! They brought Boone back to Lost!”

With the announcement yesterday that CBS is placing the recently acquired Medium on Fridays at 9 (sandwiched between Ghost Whisperer and Num3ers), the nominal dead zone on network schedules has turned into a ridiculously competitive time slot. Think about this roster of shows airing across the four networks at 9 p.m.: Medium on CBS, John Wells’ moderately well-received Southland on NBC, former phenom Ugly Betty on ABC, and the lowly rated Dollhouse from geek darling Joss Whedon on Fox. And you thought Fridays were just for reruns!

Perhaps this is a sign of things to come, though. Since the way viewers watch television programs has become increasing displaced, the day the programs actually air is becoming somewhat moot. Think of this rash of watchable Friday programming as the first step toward having an On Demand system for network television; it’s as if audiences are expressly being told to watch these shows whenever they like. So maybe this is a good thing! Or, maybe the networks just have a lot of shows they want to burn off without anyone noticing. Either way, we’ll make sure to clear some DVR space for Fridays.

In other upfront news! The CW is certainly hoping viewers like some combination of models, nostalgia and vampires (though not all at the same time), as the little-network-that-can’t added three new shows to its lineup. The Mischa Barton–starring, Ashton Kutcher–produced The Beautiful Life takes care of the models; the completely unnecessary reigniting of Melrose Place handles nostalgia; and the girl-meets-vampire tale The Vampire Diaries deals with the vampires in a manner reminiscent of Twilight. Not making the final cut? Josh Schwartz’s Gossip Girl spinoff. Which might be a bonus since it gives him more time to concentrate on both Gossip Girl and Chuck. Still, we’re fairly confident even third-rate Josh Schwartz has to be better than another Melrose Place.

Pro: The nostalgia factor is awesome…

Even the most snobbish and above-it-all television viewer has to get some perverse kick out of seeing Kelly and Brenda (Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty, natch) share the screen together all these years later. That they both rival Blake Lively in acting ability matters not; their mere visages are warm and comforting reminders of a more simple time. Meanwhile, on April 14th, Tori Spelling returns to the fray as well, reprising her role as Donna Martin. We can only hope this means Brian Austin Green isn’t far behind.

Con: …but apparently it won’t last!

Just kidding! Ms. Kirshner has said that starting next season the stunt cameos will diminish greatly because the show needs to “emerge on its own”. That the show is still called 90210 seems to be lost on her, however.

Pro: Shenae Grimes and Dustin Milligan have great chemistry together…

Say what you will about the lack of memorable characters on 90210—we still can’t tell most of the cast members apart—but the central relationship between good girl Annie and jock Ethan has been the show’s one saving grace. Shenae Grimes might be a terror off camera, but on screen she exhibits her own brand of bitchy innocence that makes Annie both sympathetic and maddening. And as the dumb-jock-with-the-good-soul, Dustin Milligan has a laid-back calmness about him that just plain works. Together, they play a believable high school couple, always fighting about nonsense and making out in front of the lockers. It’s adorable!

Con: …too bad, Dustin Milligan got fired!

Unfortunately for Mr. Milligan, Michael Ausiello from Entertainment Weekly reports that his contract wasn’t renewed for season two. Oh well, we’re sure the relationship between “the blonde girl” and “that other dude” will pick up the slack.

Pro: The show is ready to embrace its inherent corniness…

Tonight’s episode features drag racing (Fast and Furious is so hot right now), a crazy stalker, and, the return of the show’s resident “bad boy”, Liam (he's involved with the aforementioned drag racing). Meanwhile, on that April 14th episode when Ms. Spelling returns, superfan Diablo Cody shows up playing herself. You cannot get cornier than that!

Con: …but that might not be so smart!

Drag racing? Crazy stalkers? A “bad boy”? The cornier the show gets, the more it sounds like a Paula Abdul video. That isn’t a good thing.

Also helping 90210's cause: the fact that the show has immediately ingratiated itself into the cultural zeitgeist, with nearly the same gusto that sister program Gossip Girl did last year. We're not even out of September and there have been countless stories and clips on the web and newsstands about the show, ranging from Luke Perry's non-return to the starlets weight issues.

Even better news than the pick-up however comes from Michael Ausiello over at Entertainment Weekly. He reports that Rebecca Kirshner is joining the program to lord over the writers' room as an executive producer. Ms. Kirshner previously worked with show-runners Jeff Judah and Gabe Sachs on Freaks and Geeks, but she's best known for her work on Gilmore Girls. To that we say: Thank God! Someone needs to know how to write dialogue on 90210, since thus far, the results have been worse than a low-grade episode of Degrassi.

Sadly though, no reports have surfaced about any acting coaches. Poor Tristan Wilds. He might have been great on The Wire, but his line readings on 90210 would make Ed Wood cringe.

We actually latched onto The O.C. in a much more visceral way, which probably speaks more to our arrested development than anything else (we were already into our 20s when Josh Schwartz's first hit premiered.) But The O.C. had everything that we felt was missing from the original 90210: it was clever, charming, and had a sense of humor about itself. The O.C. celebrated all the hackneyed accoutrements that the teen shows like 90210 had to offer. Its creators and stars grew up watching those shows, so they knew the beats and the absurdities and were able to take full advantage of the knowledge that their audience did too.

It goes to reason then that we might be the ideal audience for the new version of 90210 (Tuesdays at 8 on The CW.) Created by Jeff Judah and Gabe Sachs (they worked together on Freaks and Geeks and our favorite, Undeclared) and Rob Thomas (he of Veronica Mars fame), 90210 might as well be called The O.C.: Beverly Hills Edition. With the exception of a handful of bon mots and extended cameo appearances thrown in for the hard cores, there is nothing here that remotely resembles the 90210 that we remember except for the zip code and the incredibly bad dialogue writing. (These guys worked with Paul Feig and Judd Apatow and this is the best they can come up with?)

The new 90210 centers on the positively Cohen-esque Wilson family: there's dad, a former West Beverly student, now returning to take on the role of principal (Rob Estes, looking constantly surprised); mom, a fashion photographer not sure about what the move will do to her children (Lori Loughlin, beautiful); daughter Annie, somehow the "outsider" at school despite being positively gorgeous (the lovely Shenae Grimes from Degrassi: The Next Generation); and adopted brother Dixon (The Wire's Tristan Wilds, a doppelganger for R&B star Chris Brown.) The Wilson clan moves to Beverly Hills to take care of family matriarch Tabitha, an aging starlet in the Norma Desmond mold played with rakish delight by Jessica Walters.

A word about Mrs. Walters: This woman needs statues erected in her honor. Yes, she's basically playing Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development, but who cares! Every single scene that she appeared in was better for it. Mrs. Walters is so vibrant, brisk and utterly hilarious, that she had us actually clapping our hands with delight. It also helps that she had all the best lines of dialogue in the pilot, leaving us wondering if she helped write some of them. For sheer excellence nothing topped: "Look at her ass. You can crack an egg on it. And I say that because when I was her age, Ricardo Montalban literally cracked an egg on mine. I won't tell the rest of the story, because I don't remember it."

Outside of Mrs. Walters, the biggest thing that stands out about the new 90210 is that when compared with some of the other teen shows, it is incredibly wholesome (Gossip Girl, we're looking at you.) And yes, we're saying that even though there was totally a "blow j" within the first five minutes of the pilot. But despite that, 90210 has a real value core rolling underneath it. These kids get grounded! They call their parents to tell them where they're going! They want to impress their parents, not feed on them! When Annie gets caught by her parents lying about a first date that took place at a San Francisco restaurant (don't ask), she actually begs them to ground her and she seems to mean it. It's a stark contrast to Blair Waldorf.

Of course, we're contractually obliged to reference all the old 90210 landmarks sprinkled in throughout the pilot: the Peach Pit, Nat, "[Brandon] called me from Belize," mega-burgers, the theme song. They all get their due respect. Unless you live under a rock, you know that Brenda and Kelly are along for the ride as well (as a drama teacher and guidance counselor, respectively.) Jeannie Garth looks positively radiant in her return to network television; like Ms. Loughlin, she's gotten more beautiful as she's gotten older. We wish we could say the same thing about Ms. Doherty, our long time crush, but time has not served her well. She used to be really, um, hot; now she just looks like a more bloated Ali Lohan. If you are wondering about how they fared in their first scene together, let's just say that Heat, it was not (it's possible the term "stilted" was invented for Ms. Doherty's line readings.)

Here's the bigger problem with bringing Brenda and Kelly back to the show: alienation of the audience. No one under the age of 25 watching this series particularly cares about Brenda and Kelly, while everyone over 25 probably wishes the entire series were about them. That's endemic of the whole show. By trying to be all things to all viewers, 90210 feels rudderless. It lacks the dry wit of The O.C., the trashy snark of Gossip Girl and the pure melodrama of the original 90210. There were actually times when we felt like we were watching a generic teen show on ABC Family (and that's as bad as it sounds ). We don't think that's the result everyone was hoping for. Simply put, 90210 has to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. Until it does, it can only be described as middling.