Marti Noxon was a staff writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as the executive producer during the last two seasons.  She had penned some very good episodes for that show, and I was intrigued by what she might do on her own.  I missed Point Pleasant, a show she created, when it originally aired, but then again I miss a lot of TV and it had a short run.  The show was cancelled mid-season by Fox, but that didn't worry me.  At one time a mid-season cancellation was a sure sign that the show wasn't any good, but now it's almost a badge of honor.  (Especially at Fox.)

After watching the entire series though, I can see why it was cancelled.  This show about the daughter of the devil isn't the eerie and spooky TV show that I was expecting.  Instead it is a poor teen soap opera.  An imitation of The O. C, and not a very good one at that.  The first few episodes are really bad, and while it does get better as it goes along, the combination of generally poor writing and a very weak lead keeps the show from ever getting better than mediocre.

Point Pleasant is a small tourist town in New Jersey.  One afternoon just as a summer squall moves in, a lifeguard at the beach, Jesse Parker (Sam Page), spots someone floating in the surf.  He rescues an unconscience girl and takes her the house of a local doctor, Ben Kramer (Richard Burgi).  (After all, who would bring a drowning victim all the way to the hospital?)  Dr. Kramer nurses the girl back to health.  It turns out that her name is Christina Nickson (Elisabeth Harnois), and the Kramer's, mother Meg (Susan Walters) and daughter Judy (Aubrey Dollar) take a liking to her so they decide to keep her.  (Really that's what happens.  I couldn't make this stuff up.)  Christina moves in with the Kramers and starts looking for her mother, a woman that she's never met.

The only problem is that Christina has powers, abilities that she can't quite control.  Whenever she gets mad she can cause accidents to happen, ones that might hurt or kill  people.  That's because she's Satan's daughter and is destined to one day lead Hell's army.  But she doesn't want to be evil and since she had a human mother, there is some good inside of her.  Now she has to decide.  Will she be good or evil?

While Christina is looking for her mother, Lucas Boyd (Grant Show) arrives in town.  He's a rich man and seemingly nice person, but in reality he's one of the devil's minions who has been sent to keep track of Christina and make sure that she turns evil on schedule.  He spots the weak people in town and quickly starts to use them and put them on the path to evil.

All this sounds interesting, but that's not really what the show is about.  Most of the time in the first several episodes involves who is sleeping with whom.  It's a teen soap opera of the worst type.  What makes it even worse, is that all of he characters are stereotypes that we've seen before in countless dramas.  There's Paula, the pretty but bitchy girl who's dating Jesse, her slutty mother, an aging beauty queen, who's trying to bag Dr. Kramer, the bad boy in town who's Jesse's best friend but still sleeps with Paula, Jesse's strict father who wants to be close to Jesse but just doesn't know how, and the unpopular ugly girl who wears her hair down and is suddenly beautiful.  Oh yeah, an apparently only tan hard bodies are aloud on the Point Pleasant beaches because only beautiful people are seen there.

To tell the truth, after the first two episodes I wanted to stop watching the show.  They were really bad.  Painfully bad.  Slamming your hand in a car door bad.  I continued though, and the series does improve a lot by the fifth episode.  At that point there is an abrupt change in the tone of the show, and they start playing up the supernatural elements of the show, and get rid of a lot of the soap opera content.  This made the show watchable, and I did start taking an interest in some of the characters, but the show still had some major flaws.

One thing that bothered me throughout the entire series was that the character progressions weren't natural.  The bitchy girl stops being bitchy and the whore mother stops hitting on the doctor, but the reasons that they gave didn't ring true. Jesse would be in love with Christina, then he'd want to kill her, then he'd love her again.  Whatever the writers decided that his emotions should be for that episode.  There wasn't a logical evolution of someone's thoughts, they'd just instantly change.

While that was irritating, the fatal flaw with the show was the character of Christina.  The premise, that Christina had to choose between good and evil, was stated often but never shown in the series.  Through the course of the series she never did anything that was really evil, and the entire time she was basically good.  (Okay, there's one exception...)  She actually was less evil than everyone else in the town.  For most of the series she seemed like the only good character at all, but she keeps on brooding and worrying about becoming evil.  Elisabeth Harnois does a horrible job in the role.  She is certainly pretty, but her acting is wooden and she never sold me that she had an evil side.  She spends a lot of time glaring but she only comes across as looking bored.  Narnois has almost no screen presence, and the scenes with her in them were uninteresting.  I'm astounded that they chose her to be in the show, much less star in it.

There were almost countless dumb mistakes and things that just didn't make sense if you thought about them for only a moment.  The church that everyone in town attends is established as being "two towns over" for example.  One of the worst of these though is when one group of people ambushes another out in the woods.  They attack them with arrows!  Why would they do that, except for the fact that the writers wanted someone who gets seriously wounded to recover.   It gets even worse when they showed the Catholic Church preparing for human sacrifices.  I had a lot of trouble suspending my disbelief at that.  Then again if you think about it, the whole premise doesn't make a lot of sense.  Why is Christina fighting her evil side anyway?  She is someone who has been raised by the devil's assistants for the last 18 years.  I'd think it would be very easy to turn a child into an evil maniac if you trained them that way since birth.

If I had to pick one bright spot from the series, it would have to be Mr. Boyd, the evil man who tries to pervert the town.  He was the only character that was really interesting and Grant Show did an excellent job.  He seemed to have fun with the role and let his character not only be evil, but enjoy being evil.  The most interesting parts of the series involved him.

The last five episodes:

The good news for fans of the show is that this set includes five episodes that never aired.  These episodes do wrap up some of the loose ends, but not all of them.  The mysterious video tape that Dr. Kramer can't destroy is played, and we learn a lot more about Jesse and the role he's supposed to play in everything.  Some interesting things about Christina's mother are also discovered.

In the last two episodes they concentrate on the main plot and pretty much try to wrap the series up, and they do that for the most part.  There is still room for the series to continue, but it does resolve some big issues, and there is a feeling of closure.  I didn't like the way they executed the final show, more abrupt emotional swings and they chose to ignore some of the plot points that were established a couple episodes earlier, but I was generally pleased with the way they closed the series.

All 13 episodes of Point Pleasant are presented on three DVDs.  They come in two thinpaks which are housed in a slipcase.  All together the set is a little bit wider than a single DVD case which is nice for those of us who have more DVDs than storage space.

Audio:

The show has a stereo surround audio track in English as well as subtitles in English, French and Spanish.  The audio quality is fine for this type of show.  There was a good amount of range, and the dialog is clear.   Some of the incidental and background music mixed a little bit too high, but that's not a major defect.  A solid sounding show.

Video:

The anamorphic widescreen 1.78:1 image looked good for a recent TV show.  The level of detail was nice and the colors were strong.  Details did have the tendency to disappear in dark areas and shadows and there was also a small amount of mosquito noise throughout the show.  These flaws weren't major though, and the show looks pretty good overall.

Extras:

The only extra included with this set is a making-of featurette which appears on the third disc.  This 15-minute short feels like it was made to promote the series when it was launched.  Though it does have clips from later on in the show, it doesn't give any insight to the series unfortunately.  It just has the actors talking about their characters and saying who wonderful and exciting the series is.

I really wish that there was a commentary track for a least the last episode.  I would have enjoyed hearing Marti Noxon's thoughts on how the show turned out, how close it was to her vision, and if the her feelings about how the show ended.

Final Thoughts:

This show gets off to a bad start, and never truly recovers.  The first couple of episodes are painfully bad, and they set the tone for a lot of what is to come.  The quality of the shows does improve, and by the fourth or fifth episode it's no longer horrid, but there are still flaws that prevent it from being really good.  If you followed the show while it was on Fox, you'll want to rent the last two DVDs to see how it turns out.  If you haven't seen this teen soap opera before, this would make a really bad blind buy.  Skip it.