'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.
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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.
Because it's The CW, we learn within five minutes of the show that Nancy Drew fucks (in a garage! Before work!). Also fucking: Her boss George (Leah Lewis) and [spoiler redacted, but you will call it within seconds], her mentor-figure Karen (Alvina August) and [also redacted, also predictable], and, hopefully soon, coworker Bess (Maddison Jaizani) and the charming Lisbeth (Katie Findlay). God bless The CW's ardent rejection of heteronormativity.
Timing isn't exactly in the show's favor here, with Nancy Drew debuting the same year as the family film Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and a few months after its logical adult counterpart Veronica Mars. Tonally, it feels like the show is trying desperately to emulate older sibling Riverdale, never mind that Nancy Drew's source material far outdates that, The CW, or even Archie comics.
Everything unfolds in a mostly predictable and wildly uninteresting manner; a sudden murder casts suspicion upon Nancy, Bess, George, their played-for-laughs-but-definitely-a-diamond-in-the-rough coworker Ace (Alex Saxon), and Nancy's wannabe beau Ned Nickerson (Tunji Kasim). The de facto gang can't resist the prospect of investigating a murder that might be pinned on them, so shenanigans occur, including breaking-and-entering, stealing a corpse's blood, reading secret files, and good ol'-fashioned spying.
Though each episode is named like an old-school Nancy Drew novel, they don't unfold as hour-long mysteries like Law & Order or House. Instead, Nancy & co. uncover deeper layers to the pilot murder, restless spirits, and their own pasts.
But here's where Nancy Drew gets real good (mild episode 1 spoiler): The ghost. In moments of complete dissonance to sexy and stylized CW fantasy, Nancy is visited by the specter of a local girl whose murder is town legend. Ghosts are the type of thing the Nancy Drew books firmly dismantled; there was always another explanation, an optical illusion, a culprit causing a diversion. The protagonist herself scoffs at the notion: "I don't believe in ghosts," she narrates seriously. "I believe in looking for the truth." Nancy, por que no los dos?
Ghost Lucy looks like something straight out of a horror movie, and even though I jumped every time I saw her juxtaposed with McMann's all-American curiosity, I also felt a thrill at how on Earth this storyline will pan out. On television, mysteries get solved, relationships start and end, and soaps remain frothy and melodramatic. Rarely do genre-bending weekday dramedies mix in the unpredictable ghost story. This could be the Nancy Drew universe's Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, and that is not a phrase to be taken lightly.
Ghostly potential as-yet unreached, Nancy Drew is not a better alternative to any of the shows from which it draws inspiration. There's Riverdale for high scandal, Veronica Mars for sleuthing, The Haunting of Hill House for mysterious chills. But if you want to throw all that into a blender and hit "purée" without putting a lid on it, go right ahead. They may save this mess yet.
Nancy Drew airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW.
Proma Khosla is a Senior Entertainment Reporter writing about all things TV, from ranking Bridgerton crushes to composer interviews and leading Mashable's stateside coverage of Bollywood and South Asian representation. You might also catch her hosting video explainers or on Mashable's TikTok and Reels, or tweeting silly thoughts from @promawhatup.
