We’ve reached the end of another long week. But before we clock out for the weekend, we’re giving props where they’re due. Here’s to our winners of the week.
Everywhere you look, another 2000s teen soap star is back on top. While Blakes Lively and Michelles Williams have been A-list more or less since their breakout hits, their co-stars’ ascent has been slow but steady for the past 20-ish years. But after some almost-hits and good faith missteps, they’re once again atop the TV pyramid. Millennials, we’re winning.
The number one show on Netflix is Nobody Wants This, a breezy but touching interfaith rom-com starring the always charming Adam Brody (forever The O.C.‘s Seth Cohen in our hearts) and Veronica Mars herself, Kristen Bell. Bell found plenty of movie success post-Veronica (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Frozen) and her NBC show The Good Place was well-received but quickly disappeared from cultural memory. Nobody Wants This makes the best use of Bell’s talents in years. As Veronica, yes, she solved crimes and took names, but viewers fell in love with her quippy sarcasm. As self-deprecating podcast co-host Joanne on NWT, sassy Bell is back!
Meanwhile Brody’s wife, Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl fame, is joining the cast of The Buccaneers in addition to being attached to Rachel Sennott’s buzzy HBO pilot. She, too, is connected to Bell, who was the voice of Gossip Girl herself, a fact a whole new generation will soon discover when the full series returns to American Netflix on October 29 (here’s every single episode, ranked).
Meester’s previous post-GG foray into television, Single Parents, was underrated and fun, but frankly, her part could have been played by any brunette with an improv background. The Apple TV project, on the other hand, features luxurious period costumes, schemes and secrets. The skills she honed as Blair Waldorf make Meester the best addition the show could have asked for.
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The Dawson’s Creek alumni aren’t doing so bad, either. Joshua Jackson’s been on prestige TV for years (The Affair, Fatal Attraction), but his new show, Dr. Odyssey, is network, which reaches a much wider audience. The reviews are inauspicious, but so what? He’s got his face plastered on billboards. His former love interest, Katie Holmes, is on Broadway in Our Town, and as for the Creek-adjacent One Tree Hill, breakout star Chad Michael Murray is filming Freakier Friday.
But the takeaway here isn’t just that actors be acting. It looks like the entertainment industry finally got the message that the best way to capitalize on nostalgia isn’t through reboots. Both the resurrected Pretty Little Liars and updated Gossip Girl have been axed by Max, and I don’t even want to talk about the Veronica Mars reboot (Logan! Please!). No, the best way to engage the now-adult audiences who grew up in the 2000s is to give their favorite actors the right material.
You know who got it right away? The makers You. Penn Badgley paying a tad too much attention to the lifestyles of the rich and perverted, a la havoc-wreaking blogger Dan Humphrey…it’s called playing to your strengths.
The post Nobody Had a Better Week Than Early 2000s Teen Stars appeared first on Glamour.
