‘Hollywood Heights’ on Nickelodeon, With James Franco




It is not a spoiler alert to say that at some point in the next few weeks on “Hollywood Heights” Eddie and Loren will finally get together.


Loren Tate is an insecure high school senior with a gift for coffeehouse folk. Eddie Duran is a pop megastar with a soft spot for maudlin lyrics. Everything about “Hollywood Heights,” which began last month and is being shown every weeknight into October on Nickelodeon, is intended to ensure that these two incomplete people find in each other what they lack: for Loren confidence and fame, for Eddie a purity of soul that’s been mangled by his celebrity.


“Hollywood Heights” is billed as an English-language telenovela, based on the Mexican show “Alcanzar una Estrella” (“To Reach a Star”). There have of course been English-language telenovelas before. They’re called soap operas. But unlike Spanish-language originals, which can be convoluted and veer off in unanticipated directions, there are almost no detours on “Hollywood Heights,” which boils down to two parallel stories that slowly — very slowly — converge in the middle. The show’s five-times-a-week schedule means that there’s far more television to watch, even though there are far fewer directions for it to go in.


Eddie — played by Cody Longo, who displays the emotional hooligan contradictions of a young Jason Gedrick — is a dreamer saddled with a gold-digger girlfriend, Chloe (Melissa Ordway); a fun-hating taskmaster of a manager, Jake (Brandon Bell); and millions of fans who won’t let him be. Among them is Loren (a dewy Brittany Underwood), who, goaded by her chatterbox best friend, Mel (Ashley Holliday), and her sympathetic bombshell mom, Nora (Jama Williamson), is hoping to get Eddie’s attention with her lyrics, which she enters in a songwriting contest and sends to him on Twitter.


And it’s on the Internet that the two first meet, though its just a Twitter handle Eddie falls for. What makes this telenovela modern, however notionally, is its embrace of technology. Over the first three weeks of the show there’s been theft of electronic equipment, Twitter romance, hacking of a school computer, hacking of the hacker’s computer, and more.


Even though the melodrama, highly structured scripting and stilted camera shots are indebted to the telenovela form, “Hollywood Heights” owes the most to the rat-tat-tat rhythms of “Gilmore Girls.” Loren and her mom are made in the Rory and Lorelei mold, and Mel, with her “Toddlers & Tiaras” jokes, is a worthy, if grating, Lane knockoff. And there’s music snobbery, thanks to the all-in-one computer nerd and music geek Adam (Nick Krause), to whom Loren has to defend her idol, Eddie, with the impressively misaligned defense, “Pitchfork says that his new sound puts him in a class with Girls and Cut Copy.”


Like any good telenovela “Hollywood Heights” has its share of villains and interlopers: Eddie’s father, Max (Carlos Ponce, whose Spanish accent slips out in scenes where he has to do more than just purr or mope), who hopes to end his son’s relationship; Tyler (Justin Wilczynski), who maintains an affair with Chloe, and an unhealthy fixation on Eddie; and Don (Grayson McCouch, whose features all gather at the middle of his face, in that Clooney way), Nora’s boss, who’s a terrible single father and possibly a serial workplace sexual harasser. These one-note characters exist largely to mirror the main players or to make them appear more righteous by contrast.


In the spirit of telenovela viewing I set out to watch “Hollywood Heights” every night at its appointed time, a relapse to pre-time-shifted viewing habits and an accession to the wishes of programmers, who hope that one story is worth checking in with five times a week.


The problems with this plan began with the first broadcast, on June 19. I’d had a bit of insomnia the night before and ended up napping through the premiere. I watched it later that night — no harm, no foul.


But anything could be a disruption — dinner plans, a concert, a desire to sit somewhere other than in front of the television. Before long, episodes began to pile up in the DVR like incomplete homework assignments. I started grabbing them in batches, two and three at a time, sometimes during meals or during fits of returning weeks of unanswered e-mail.


Fortunately telenovelas, with their rote acting and easy-to-follow and heavily repeated plotlines, are ideal background viewing. There was no escaping that while an hour a night made for an untenable time commitment, there was still a warm familiarity to visiting the show in big gulps, more satisfying than the weekly heavy-breathing countdown to new episodes of “The Newsroom” or “Mad Men.” Whenever the urge struck, there were almost certainly episodes yet to watch. It was comfort TV with narrative soul.


What awoke me from that pleasant semi-slumber was, naturally, James Franco.


At the end of the show’s second week Eddie was being courted for a movie role by a square-seeming executive. Turns out, though, that he was working for Oz, a mad movie mogul, played by Mr. Franco, wealthy enough to hire Eddie for a film but not sensible enough to make use of a comb.


Oz hasn’t gotten much screen time yet, but when he’s there, Mr. Franco chews more than his share of scenery, which turns out to be a necessary strategy. In an environment like this, in which all the performances have soft edges, and no one is steering the scenes too aggressively, acting out is the only sort of acting that gets noticed. His frazzled energy isn’t realistic but is instead fantastical and a running commentary on the stiltedness of the rest of the proceedings.


After a second appearance, though, Mr. Franco began to feel less like a welcome interloper and more like a prankster, aware of the limitations of those around him and throwing off enough glare to keep the focus firmly on himself. But even Mr. Franco is probably no match for the impending radiance of Loren and Eddie, a sunbeam no Hollywood prankster, real or fictional, can disrupt.