Michelle Trachtenberg vs. Emily VanCamp
Battle of the Girls Next Door (If Your Door Is On The WB)

WARNING: Contains a comparatively tiny The Ring Two spoiler!

Around here (and...elsewhere), we give The WB a lot of shi. We say its shows are uninspired clones of each other. And we've observed that said shows generally serve no purpose but to incubate the stars of tomorrow's low-budget Dimension Films horror joints. Don't worry: we're not going to use this space to recant either view. It's just that, if we had written this analysis of today's subjects last month, it might have turned out very differently. Michelle Trachtenberg and Emily VanCamp, we are very disappointed in both of you.

We had kind of liked Trachtenberg, you see. She was given the absolutely thankless job of being Buffy's Cousin Oliver in the show's fifth (and should have been final) season, but she showed that she had grown from a likably normal-seeming child actor (contrast her in Harriet the Spy with Dakota Fanning...ever) into a cutely inoffensive teen. By the time she appeared as Dawn, the Buffy cast had been together for a good long while, having established their interrelationships and onscreen chemistry, and it would be a daunting task for anyone to horn in on that; Trachtenberg did as good a job under the circumstances as anyone could hope to. Yes, Dawn was annoying -- but Dawn was supposed to be annoying. (Sarah Michelle Gellar certainly had no such excuse in her portrayal of Buffy.)

EuroTrip was unfortunate. We're not going to sit here and act like it was either a good movie or a good career move, because it wasn't. But maybe she thought it would pay off later: if director Jeff Schaffer turned out to be the next Todd Phillips and actually had an Old School in him, she'd have gotten in on the ground floor. Regrettably, the ground floor of the Jeff Schaffer Tower is as high as that elevator goes; it only travels downward, through a series of sub-basements. Like the screenplay for The Cat in the Hat. But still, we held out hope for Trachtenberg -- never more than during her recurring guest-star role on Six Feet Under in its most recent season. Trachtenberg played Celeste, a hardened showbiz veteran in the body of a simpering teen queen; any resemblance to Hilary Duff or Lindsay Lohan was, undoubtedly, a freaky coincidence! Playing a nasty satire on a variation of her own public image must mean both that Trachtenberg had a sense of humour about herself (which Lohan would do well to develop, by the way) and was sufficiently self-aware of the potential pitfalls in a teen-to-young-adult career transition to avoid them, we thought.

But maybe all of that nuance was lost on Trachtenberg, and she just took the part in order to get to make out with Mathew St. Patrick (not necessarily a bad idea, really), because last weekend's Ice Princess suggests that Trachtenberg is just another Linds-alike, now with her own toothless, tween-friendly Disney production, but without the charm (or multi-generational appeal) of Freaky Friday. Like Lohan's character in Mean Girls, Trachtenberg's Casey Carlyle is supposed to be some kind of child prodigy, which we guess is supposed to make us ignore the cloying girliness of the film's figure-skating storyline. (See also: the Princess Diaries franchise, where the antique notions of overdetermined femininity are supposedly mitigated with "hilarious" pratfalls, even when the stories hinge on an elaborate physical makeover, in the first, and extremely early marriage in the second.) We can't wait for Disney to bring us a heroine smart enough to get admission to Yale's Geometry program at age sixteen...only to discover when she gets there that what she really wants to do is cheer! Look out for Protractors & Pompoms, starring Hayden Panettiere, in theatres February 17, 2006.

Anyway: we expected better of Trachtenberg; maybe we shouldn't have. And maybe we shouldn't have expected better of Emily VanCamp, who is so adorably button-eyed as Everwood's Amy Abbott (speaking of whom, when are we going to get the dénouement of the pregnant Madison storyline?! Damn you, Summerland!), than to appear in one-thirtieth (or so) of The Ring Two. And see, now, again, we grant that this must have seemed like a good idea when her agent got the offer: the first movie was smart, moody, and genuinely scary, and it made a huge star of Naomi Watts (and even did great things for bit players Amber Tamblyn and Adam Brody). But the sequel is a nonsensical hash that doesn't adhere to its own internal logic because it doesn't have an internal logic. ("She can't hear us when we sleep"? WHAT?) And it's not as though VanCamp is the only actor whose talents are squandered; why even get a Gary Cole if he's only going to be in one scene?

But here's the thing. VanCamp is now where Trachtenberg was about three years ago: coming to the end (probably) of her time on a well-regarded show that was about to disgorge a whole passel of young actors to the movie market. VanCamp needs to realize that she's better than most of the material she's going to be offered -- the teen sex romps, the insultingly girly tween flicks, the cheap and shitty horror movies that last two weeks on the box office top ten and then are forgotten completely. The WB does a great job of creating young stars, but once their shows end, those stars have to take all that goodwill The WB has given them and put it to good use. Ice Princess is not a good use of public goodwill, though Michelle Trachtenberg probably doesn't realize that. The Ring Two isn't either, but if Emily VanCamp saw it last weekend in a crowd full of bored, disappointed viewers, she probably figured it out, and learned a very valuable lesson. (And so did we: we should have sat through it with our eyes covered, too; maybe then we'd just be catatonic with disgust instead of dead of boredom.)

Advantage: VanCamp.