Valley Peaks – Tearing Down Melodrama To New Heights… Brea Grant!!! Hello Google User

It turns out that describing spoof television in any relevant way is rather difficult. Valley Peaks is a webshow that takes as its subject of attack just about anything on television with actors in their twenties. One Tree Hill, The OC, 90210, and daytime soaps all spring to mind while viewing Valley Peaks (and to be honest so does a lot of other garbage I’ve never watched). But beyond citing those references and mentioning the general genre of interest, it isn’t easy to relate what’s going on.

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It would be nice to say that the show is about certain characters who have certain connections to each other, and possibly that it relates to their lives as… whatever, but it would be ridiculous despite being possible. It’s about a certain group of people who are connected in various ways, like all the shows it spoofs, but Valley Peaks is really just about the ludicrous reactions to events that transpire. It’s about utterly unreal and dizzingly shallow people, and the fabulous nonsense that can be built around them.

Perhaps more importantly, it is about television (or classes of same) not only being brainless, but promoting brainlessness. It’s also about spinning this whole crazy section of television into something hilarious roughly five minutes at a time.

Valley Peaks is some geographic location, and we follow characters such as Brady the uber-male, Brittany, who is innocence personified, and Reese, who is the tragic “person who used to be the coolest thing on Earth, but now is in a wheelchair.” The stories wander through break-ups, goofy feats of macho nonsense, and character developments that spin irony into both “character” and “development.”

Though the show is built toward the flash of the “big deal” we happen to be looking at right now, the subtleties are wonderful as well. Valley Peaks overdoes everything by design, but you can’t get lost to that, or you miss the finer touches. For example, even in the surprisingly humorous credits, you can’t just take them for granted. From people getting lost in the intricacies of dealing with a wind machine, to the guy who is facing the wrong direction, the credits show you right off the bat that this is a show that isn’t missing any opportunity to take its shots.

The show features a cast full of wonderfully over-the-top actors and guest appearances by Brea Grant (Heroes) and Kato Kaelin (ummm…..). It struck me while watching the series, perhaps surprisingly, just how hard it must be to act really badly in a good way. At several points during the show it stood out to me just how easily the whole show could have gone wrong, and ended up completely worthless. The general idea would have sat there empty and hollow, and there would be no point to any of it. The difference simply being a cast that could only manage acting badly… badly… or something. As it stands it’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t have guessed what a dangerous game it is.

It’s one of the better examples of the usefulness and entertainment value of webshows, and I definitely recommend checking it out.

Here’s the first episode and a few clips from character video blogs.