Creator: Liz Gateley
Airs: Wednesday at 10:30 on MTV
Two equally beautiful blondes – the play-by-the-rules angel who’s genuinely in it for companionship and the conniving, though sympathetic flirt who’s in it for the spite – vie for the same surfer-type boy who conveniently goes shirtless every couple of minutes. The endlessly engrossing high-school love triangulation formula that so mythically drove the first two seasons (Season Three threw a brunette in the mix with some inauspicious consequences) of ‘Laguna Beach,’ is, thankfully, just as successful up the coast. ‘Laguna’ producers got great enjoyment out of calling ‘Laguna’ The Real O.C., but now, they really can because, well, Newport Beach is where ‘The O.C.’ actually took place. ‘Newport Harbor,’ MTV’s more-than-sufficient attempt to keep its mega-hit, while making a northerly change in location, though, is glorious proof that it doesn’t matter where this now-classic formula is taken: it’ll always work. Granted, the melodrama must be taking place somewhere in California, but, that’s, like, a given.
The one addition ‘Newport’ brings to the formula is parental presence, a promising new source of drama. Narrator Chrissy, who even looks like her super-missed predecessors LC and Kristin, has a hyper-controlling father who is so meddlesome that he stays with Chrissy during what’s supposed to be a friends-only trip to Palm Springs where he stops her from merely talking to her crush Clay in the hotel room. Allie, Chrissy’s Clay-hungry rival, can spot Lindsay Lohan in a picture just by looking at her teeth, and she doesn’t have ultra-bossy parents to worry about. You’d think she’d have the upper hand in the whole thing, but things, just as they weren’t in ‘Laguna,’ aren’t that simple.
Chrissy and Allie take the ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’ mantra very seriously. They appear to be enemies, but they’re always at dinners together, they even vacation together. It’s all part of the ‘Laguna’ formula. They’ve got mutual friends. Tons of them. And they're all just as good-looking.
