TV Reviews for Regular People: Nancy Drew
Nancy Drew, CW Television
One of the personal rules I have for myself as a writer is “don’t write about something if you’re just going to write the same thing every other pundit in America has already written on this subject.” That’s one reason I don’t write about the president very often. But I’ve run into a dilemma here with “Nancy Drew.” Every other writer of TV reviews has included this line about the new CW show:
“This is NOT your mother’s Nancy Drew.”
I get it. It’s a takeoff on the old slogan “This is NOT your father’s” fill-in-the-blank, but it’s a girl’s show, so we’re all gonna be really clever and change it up. And it was probably clever of the first person who wrote it. But when you read it in every review, not so much. And my whole point here is to say something different from what everyone else here is saying.
But I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to put this. Technically, if you are a teen girl in the demographic this show is aiming for, it would have been your great grandmother reading the original books, that were first published in 1930. Your grandmother probably loved them in the ’50s. I know I loved them when I was growing up in the ’70s (although they were dated even then.) But this isn’t their Nancy Drew. It isn’t even my Nancy Drew. This is a different character altogether.
For one thing, new Nancy is working as a waitress in the local diner instead of as an assistant to her father. Her boyfriend, Ned is an African-American ex-con, and you get to see some steamy sex scenes. Bess and George are along for the ride, but instead of being besties, George is an old high school frenemy of Nancy’s (and Asian) and Bess is a kleptomaniac.
Not your mother’s Nancy Drew indeed.
At least her mother is still dead (although new Nancy is still struggling with the aftermath of her death whereas old Nancy never even mentioned it) and her dad is still a lawyer.
If you’re a fan of the “Riverdale” series, the dark take on the old “Archie” comic books that leads into this show, then you’ll probably enjoy the new Nancy as well. “Nancy Drew” has also drawn a lot of comparisons to one of the early CW shows “Veronica Mars.” And when “Veronica” first premiered she was often compared to the fictional Nancy (as is every other teen detective portrayed in movies and TV.) I was a huge fan of “Veronica Mars,” at least until Hulu rebooted it and broke my heart. From the very first episode I was hooked, wanting to know “who killed Lily Kane?” “Nancy Drew would have been better if it had followed the “Veronica Mars” profile of having a mystery of the week for her to solve as well as an overarching mystery of the season. Because I’m not sure this plotline is engaging enough to keep viewers interested for multiple episodes.
The show starts with a flashback to young Nancy solving the mystery of a missing child. We don’t get to see what other cases young Nancy has solved, because after the death of her mother, her life tanks, she doesn’t get into college and she’s given up on sleuthing. At least until this show opens and a wealthy socialite is murdered in the parking lot of the diner where she works. Every character on the show, including Nancy, quickly becomes a suspect and Nancy has to resume her sleuthing career to clear her own name. A big tip of the hat to the CW for casting Pamela Sue Martin (that would be MY Nancy Drew) in a cameo in this pilot.
Oh, and the other twist in this new show? THERE’S A REAL GHOST! So, we can call “Nancy Drew” the mystery love child of “Veronica Mars” and “Supernatural!”
One reason I hate starting new shows is that I hate getting all wrapped up in a storyline only to have the show cancelled before I get answers. The good news for fans is that this show airs on the CW, so it will have a longer chance to wrap up this mystery before this show gets cancelled. After all, “Supernatural” is still on after 15 years. But if you’re going to miss the ghost hunting Winchesters, maybe you can start following the adventures of the new real-ghost-seeing Nancy Drew.
I really don’t get the impulse to modernize light-hearted kids entertainment by making them darker and sexier. I guess Riverdale had some sort of subversive logic but how many young millennials, the presumed target audience for this show, will know who Nancy Drew is? There was probably greater awareness of Archie and that made Riverdale a somewhat more sensical thing to subvert. It just seems that somebody had a plot idea for a new mystery show and somebody said, “hey, why don’t we name the characters from the Nancy Drew and advertise this as not your mother’s Nancy Drew?” It makes no sense.Report
As an Xer, lemme field this one.
One of the things I grew up with was the Pop Culture of my forebears. I watched the Three Stooges and Mr. Ed and Batman ’66 and Star Trek in reruns. When I could get away with it, I listened to Motown artists and Elvis and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. I read Mad Magazine and they parodied movies that I wasn’t allowed to see because they were rated R but I was allowed…ish… to read the Mad Magazines that mostly captured the plotline of the movies I wasn’t allowed to see.
(I know the plots of Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon because of Mad Magazine. I’ve never seen the movies… but I pretty much got the gist of them.)
The books I grew up with were stuff like the Beverly Cleary books and the Judy Blume books and, yes, The Hardy Boys.
The friends who had older brothers/sisters said “hey, check this stuff out” and I found myself with all sorts of cool stuff to read and listen to and it was stuff given them by the older brothers/sisters of their own friends.
It felt good to get something that I knew that the cool older kids liked.
Rebooting Nancy Drew is an attempt to be an older brother/sister to the kidz these days.
The world doesn’t work like it used to, of course. But that’s what they’re going for, I reckon.Report
Heh. I’m amused by the idea of MAD Magazine acting as a movie-recap service…but then, you’re not wrong!Report
“It just seems that somebody had a plot idea for a new mystery show and somebody said, “hey, why don’t we name the characters from the Nancy Drew and advertise this as not your mother’s Nancy Drew?” It makes no sense.”
Because that show might get made, while the original idea won’t.
Also, the vast majority of people I see online who watch Riverdale have almost zero connection to the comics, beyond whatever they might’ve gotten as presents from very uncool relatives when they were six or whatever. Same basic thing with Nancy Drew.
Also, while hipster twentysomethings may watch Riverdale because it’s subverting Archie comics, the tweens or teens I see in reaction videos on Youtube largely seem to enjoy it because it’s hot people doing crazy things – aka, every prime time soap since Peyton Place.Report
People keep saying these things but part of me doubts that movie and tv producers are so hidebound that they wouldn’t green light this show if it didn’t have any connection to Nancy Drew. It doesn’t make sense that “hot blonde waitress with ex-con African American boyfriend named Stacy and Jonathan doesn’t get made but rename them Nancy Drew and Ned, least likely African-American male name ever, and its all golden to the money people. The money people probably don’t have any memories of Nancy Drew either.
I guess my other issue is that the subversive nature of the show feels fake. It reminds me of the review of V for Vendetta in the NYT. The reviewer notes how there all these teenage boys seeing V for Vendetta as really subversive when it wasn’t that subversive at all and she wished she could show them something really challenging.Report
Technically, Veronica Mars had a ghost, too, in Lilly Kane. Yes, 99% of that was clearly just Veronica projecting her issues with that unsolved murder….but what happened in the season two premier, after the murder’s been solved, is pretty hard to explain.Report