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This smells like a shameless grab for publicity, but that’s what makes it interesting to me. So you have 90210, a remake of a hugely popular, long-running show, and it’s kind of… not good. Compounding this problem is the fact that ratings dropped 30% in its second week and it’s currently being aired on a fledgling network that really needs a hit. So if you’re the CW, what do you do? You try to keep the buzz going as much as possible: and that’s where Perez Hilton comes in.
Anything on Perez Hilton should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, but this whole story seems especially dubious. According to “sources,” 90210 star Shenae Grimes is cultivating quite the bad-girl reputation on set. She’s allegedly terrorizing the cast and crew and going around yelling hilarious Sunset Boulevard-type accusations like, “This is my show – everyone else is riding my coattails.”
Of course, her co-stars are denying any on-set strife, but seriously. What else are they going to do? You deny, deny, deny–until the show is long over and its time to publish your memoir; that’s when the fistfight stories come out. The original 90210 was hugely popular for both its storylines and the cast’s off-screen antics. Shannen Doherty was famously known as a “bitch on wheels” whose relationship with her castmates was so bad that her character, Brenda Walsh, eventually got shipped off to London to study the theatre, never to be heard from again.
While producers of the new 90210 probably don’t want the same fate to befall their adorable scrunchy-faced Annie Wilson, they are no doubt loving the comparisons to the original successful, highly-rated series. Regardless of whether the rumors are true or not, the end result is the same: stories are being written about 90210 on a nearly daily basis and buzz is being built. Sometimes just saying a show is important is enough to make it so. It worked for the CW once with Gossip Girl, and they’re obviously betting on the formula once again.
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Sep 21, 2008 @ 10:11 EST5EDT
