Point Pleasant

Point Pleasant (2005) is a television series created by Marti Noxon. It ran on FOX as a mid-season replacement, but was cancelled by the network before all of its episodes had aired. It has since been released on DVD in its entirety.

The show concerned the supernatural events that followed the arrival of a teenaged girl named Christina Nickson (Satan's daughter, played by Elizabeth Harnois) to the coastal town of Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

The show was sort of like a cross between Beverly Hills 90210 and Dark Shadows: Satanic soap opera with attractive young people running around on beaches.

Marti Noxon said of the show:

We took a beating in the ratings, but then they started to go, and we accelerated the action, and I really wanted her to be fully evil in the second season. ... After the first five episodes there was a shift, and we started to get more spooky, and we were taking it away from the soap-opera aspect. It was getting discombobulated with all the characters. It was The O.C. meets The Omen, but I didn't know [that] the beach and girls in the bikinis had much to do with anything. ... At first we got lambasted by some of the reviews, and somewhat deservingly. We got off to the wrong start. But when it started getting good, the critics were still being snarky about it and didn't give it another chance. By then, Fox didn't want to promote it anymore.

Characters

Although it certainly featured some stereotyped female characters (Amber Hargrove, the scheming divorcée out to trap another woman's man, for example), there were some good female-female relationships. The protagonist, Christina Nickson aka Daughter-of-Satan, has a friendship with Judy Kramer. Yes, they talk about boys, but they also talk about religion and how to help Christina avoid sliding into evil.

Judy's mom, Meg Kramer, is crazy or psychic or both, and is traumatized over the death of her other daughter prior to the show. In a 2005 interview, Noxon noted that she was working on a rewrite of a film by Sam Raimi, "which features a character in a mental institution." "I really liked the storyline with Judy's mom, Meg, and how people thought she was crazy because she was hearing her dead daughter."

Female characters include

• Christina Nickson (played by Elizabeth Harnois)
• Judy Kramer (played by Aubrey Dollar)
• Meg Kramer, Judy's mom (played by Susan Walters)
• Amber Hargrove (played by Dina Meyer, who also was in Birds of Prey (TV series))
• Paula Hargrove, Amber's daughter (played by Cameron Richardson)
• Sarah Parker, Jesse Parker's mother (played by Clare Carey)
• Holly, Boyd's murdered girlfriend (played by Elizabeth Bennett)

List of episodes

Episodes in bold were written, co-written or directed by women.

1. "Pilot" (19 Jan 2005), co-written by Marti Noxon
2. "Human Nature" (20 Jan 2005), written by Marti Noxon
3. "Who's Your Daddy?" (27 Jan 2005), directed by Marita Grabiak
4. "The Lonely Hunter" (3 Feb 2005), written by Andrea Newman
5. "Last Dance" (10 Feb 2005)
6. "Secrets and Lies" (17 Feb 2005)
7. "Unraveling" (10 Mar 2005)
8. "Swimming With Boyd" (17 Mar 2005), written by Jenny Lynn
9. "Waking the Dead" (UNAIRED), directed by Marita Grabiak
10. "Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Choked" (UNAIRED), co-written by Terri Hughes Burton
11. "Missing" (UNAIRED), co-written by Andrea Newman
12. "Mother's Day" (UNAIRED)
13. "Let the War Commence" (UNAIRED), written by Marti Noxon and Jenny Lynn

External Links

• IMDb listing for Point Pleasant
• Wikipedia entry
• Television Without Pity - 3 episodes
• Interview with Elizabeth Harnois, SciFi Online
• Dan Devine, Review, Pop Matters
• Wikiquote
• Sci411 (misc. news and quotes from interviews with Marti Noxon)

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