'Nancy Drew' is a pile of mediocrity with one chance at redemption

If you forgot there was a spicy teen soap about Nancy Drew premiering Wednesday on The CW, don't feel too bad.

The series, from teen drama vets Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (The O.C., Gossip Girl, Marvel's Runaways, Hulu's upcoming Looking For Alaska), has plenty of signature tenets of the duo's oeuvre and CW mainstays, but in its first two episodes fails to hook viewers with the kind of characters, relationships, and then-edgy plot lines that made some of their early-2000s work so magnetic.

But there is hope.

Nancy Drew (Kennedy McMann) is an intrepid girl who chases mysteries because she saw her parents pull a creepy trunk out of the ground when she was a child and her mother tried to convince her it was a dream (really!). She became obsessed with finding answers — albeit not about the trunk excavated in her own backyard — and helped solve local crimes, gaining some bitter notoriety with local law enforcement. But all that stopped when her mother died of cancer one year before the series begins. Read more...