ICYMI: Grosse Pointe, a Struggling WB Show About a Struggling WB Show Called Grosse Pointe

“Yes, it is … and it isn’t. Because I created [90210], I have a close association with that show. But to me, these characters are all archetypes. There’s the bitchy diva. The neurotically insecure actress with sort of a heart of gold. There’s the narcissistic star. There’s the kid who’s over the hill but still trying to hold onto his youth. To the extent that the characters on 90210 sort of fit into those cliches, I think you can find a lot of parallels, but at the same time these are relatively great stock Hollywood types. But I’m not denying [the comparison]. I come from the school of ‘write what you know.’”

And when asked if Grosse Pointe was some sort of “revenge” against Aaron Spelling and 90210—after Star had left 90210 and Melrose Place to develop Central Park West for CBS in New York, Spelling refused to let him continue on as a creative consultant for the two shows he’d created—Star said:

“It’s not about revenge at all. I don’t think about Aaron Spelling when I think about 90210.’ I think about me. I’m doing a sendup of my experiences, and to me, there’s a big sense of presumptuousness for other people to come in and say, ‘You can’t do that.’”

Allegedly, that’s what ended up happening with Grosse Pointe and the Marcy character. According to Star, before he started making Grosse Pointe, he called Spelling to let him know that he was “doing a sendup of 90210” and that he hoped he’d make a cameo. (Jason Priestley and Joe E. Tata both appeared as exaggerated versions of themselves.) Spelling apparently went from amused to upset upon seeing the pilot and made his unhappiness with the show known to WB higher-ups (which held even more weight as he was executive producer of their highest-rated show, 7th Heaven, and their new series Charmed). “There were some things he was upset about that to me were total fabrications, but he took it all very personally,” Star said. “The minute you look at a satire and recognize yourself, you’re going to find things that weren’t even intended.” This led to changes with the Marcy character, from the nepotism story—as Star made clear, “I didn’t want to personally offend someone who I’ve had a relationship with for years”—to her hair color, as it was dark red (as Tori’s was late-season 90210) in the pilot and had to be digitally altered for her to appear as a brunette.

In terms of standing on its own as a piece, while Grosse Pointe had the 90210 entry point as shorthand for audiences to get from the beginning—even if they didn’t get all the behind-the-scenes lingo, like Hunter joking about the show’s regular “5 share” ratings—the series worked best as a broader satire of the industry in general, as Star intended, and within the context of its existence on The WB (both the real show and the show-within-a-show). The art-imitates-life nature of a struggling show on The WB about a struggling show on The WB only provided Grosse Pointe with more material than just going for jokes based on a show that had just ended that May after a 10-season run and defined a whole other era than the one The WB was courting. The pilot actually hits this note perfectly almost right out the gate—which is why it’s surprising it doesn’t continue to consistently hone onto the clear joke that was being a show on The WB until a few episodes later. Its second episode’s scenes for the show-within-a-show were a direct riff on Young Americans, recreating the highly-promoted scene where the sexy WB teens stripped off their clothes as they ran to a lake in slow motion, even set to the same musical cue. (Young Americans came and went in the summer of 2000, making this bit even more timely.)

But it was Hunter’s one-sided feud with Sarah Michelle Gellar—the result of believing that Gellar, among others like Reese Witherspoon and Catherine Zeta-Jones, had the career she deserved but was denied because of Grosse Pointe—that pulled everything together, as Grosse Pointe’s one season would regularly invoke Buffy’s name to show just how low on the totem pole it was. The fifth episode, “Halloween,” even took it a step further with Grosse Pointe having to shoot an “it was all a dream” stunt episode where Grosse High was on the Hellmouth and Becky was the Chosen One, all because of Buffy’s success.

This Buffy-envy culminated in Grosse Pointe’s penultimate episode, “Passion Fish,” in which Gellar cameoed as herself, before making the jump to UPN. In the episode, network liaison Joan (Merrin Dungey) tells Rob how The WB’s new initiative is stuntcasting, only for Rob to see the list of celebrities The WB is hoping for and realizing, “You’ve gotta actually know these people to call in a favor.” That point also explains just how struggling WB show could manage to book The WB’s biggest star for sweeps, as Gellar and Sloane are real-life best friends. Previous cameos were either because of who Star knew (Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis) or because of the night the show aired on (Popular’s Carly Pope and Leslie Bibb), with an exception in the form of Ted Danson as the voice of a talking dog. Despite Grosse Pointe’s entire premise paving the way for more WB stars to appear as themselves, it really wasn’t a non-stop WB cameo machine. In fact, its last two cameos, were from Dweezil Zappa (a person the intended WB audience wouldn’t even know was a real person) and Elizabeth Berkley showing up late to another wedding, this time with no Tiffani Amber Thiessen (about whom one of the harsher 90210 jokes of the series is made) in sight.

Despite critical acclaim, Grosse Pointe fell into “the before its time” realm, in terms of why it didn’t last for longer than a 17-episode first and only season, but it was also very much of its time based on its topic and execution. Essentially “Soapdish for the TRL era” after The WB already attempted and failed at ”Soap for the TRL era,” Grosse Pointe had what would be considered a winning formula even today. A Darren Star-created series with a popular lead-in—Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, coming straight from ABC’s TGIF line-up and into Grosse Pointe’s punchlines—and followed up by a kindred spirit in Popular’s second season.

But it was a Darren Star-created series that wasn’t interested in sugarcoating what was sold as the warm world of The WB, as well as one whose central character was also its villain, Hunter. (A villain whose layers were peeled back to reveal the method behind her madness, but still.) The unflinching mean streak—despite creating a clear sympathetic character in Sloane’s Marcy—just wasn’t the right fit for a network like The WB, because its audience wanted to believe in the magic the network was selling. Grosse Pointe was clearly for an older audience than Sabrina and possibly even Popular, as its series premiere even got the “recommended for [The WB’s] teen and adult audience” warning that was sometimes trotted out, despite supposedly being a network for teen audiences in the first place.

In retrospect, kind of like Josie and the Pussycats—a sharper satire—Grosse Pointe existed in such a time and place that to truly “get” it on a fundamental level, and for it to hit as hard as it should, you also had to have experienced the cultural phenomenon it was lambasting. Not just getting the 90210 inspirations, but why a character would call Zoe, Duncan, Jack, and Jane “a mistake,” or the crossover appeal of Sarah Michelle Gellar and how that trickled down or the entire bit about Oliver Stone’s Monica Lewinski biopic (which, surprisingly, holds up far better than literally any other Lewinski-related bit or joke from the past.) If any of that makes sense to you, welcome to Gross Pointe.

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