It's so weird to me that the contestants are also expected to play
themselves as murder victims/corpses. It blurs the line between
contestant/actor WAAAAY too much for me. Even more so than the
ridiculously stagey way the contestants treat the setup as something
legit.

THIS.

The Sensational Character Find of 2013: Robyn the Boy Wonder!

They aired The Magic Sword last week, so they're clearly not averse to digging through the MST3K archive for film selections.

I don't think first evil ex from Scott Pilgrim is in this. Avan Jogia is the lead male character, and he's most well known for Disney Channel stuff.

I agree with everything here.

There are some major similarities (another is that the mysterious murder happened in the past and tarnished the rep of our protagonist, who is now something of an outcast in his school/hometown, etc.), but if this show borrows anything from VM season 1, all I really want is VM's dedication to resolving every mystery…

This was fun! I really hope there's a Veronica Mars structure going on here, and the mystery of Regina's death (and presumably what really happened to Danny's aunt) will be solved by the end of this season. I would hate to see this become a convoluted soap—the initial premise is so clean and interesting.

"The strangest thing about Mistresses might be that it got picked up at all."

It is the last name of the police officer and her ex-husband. The kids took her name.

Good Lord. This is pretty blah, but ABC Family's insistence that we discuss the drug-stealing scene on Twitter with hashtag #MarianasSecret was enough to make me bail.

I disagree with dygitalninja that a normal nuclear family can't be an interesting unit for a show (that's like saying you can't make a sitcom about a bunch of friends hanging out anymore), but it is true that if the linking theme of your shows is "family," then it's pretty obvious to work out as many variations on…

I think they also air it in the mid-morning. I'm pretty sure my mom still watches it like a morning talk show.

Are there a lot of schools without vice principals? I didn't know that!

Yay, David Pasquesi! I've had an inappropriate crush on him since he played the abusive boyfriend to Jerri's stepmother on Strangers With Candy.

I watched the show for Bebe. Hell, I saw The Addams Family Musical for Bebe.

I think you're right about how it falls to the actors, but I come to a mystery show for a good puzzle. There was virtually no puzzle work in tonight's episode, save a quick inference here or there. (Well, there was a lot of puzzle work going on, but we were left outside of it.) It may just be that I came to this show…

I really could have done without the scene of the killer feeling up the body too. I know they want the shock factor when the women discover the victim, and that's fine—it works for the character arcs. But before then, it's just cheap and exploitative.

Did anyone find the mystery-solving stuff sorely lacking? Puzzle plots work fine in print, because you can provide a map and let the reader try to figure it out for themselves.

That would be fun. They're bringing back Hastings and Miss Lemon!