Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Grand Hotel’ On ABC, An Eva Longoria-Produced Telenovela About A Glamorous Miami Hotel With A Seemy Side

American audiences now have enough experience with network telenovelas to know what works and what doesn’t. There’s a certain flow, a certain spark, and a penchant for laughs paired with high drama that makes the best of them very attractive to audiences. ABC, a network not shy about airing bombastic dramas, has a new Eva Longoria-produced telenovela debuting this summer, starring none other than Oscar nominee Demián Bichir. Read on for more info on…

GRAND HOTEL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A category-4 hurricane pounds Miami; at the Riviera Grand Hotel, the guests are herded down to the showroom to get a “hurricane party”, hosted by the hotel’s owner, Santiago Mendoza (Demián Bichir).

The Gist: During that hurricane, a line cook went missing, not long after being threatening Mendoza’s wife Gigi (Roselyn Sanchez) with what she knows about something Mendoza did. One year later, the hotel seems to be doing well, and Gigi’s daughter Carolina (Feliz Ramirez) is getting married. Santiago’s kids — their mother, whose family controlled the hotel since it opened in 1951, has been gone for a while, but she always envisioned the hotel staying in the family — are reluctant to celebrate. Javi (Bryan Craig) is too busy bedding down hotel guests who want to do things like look at the stump where his right leg once was; Alicia (Denyse Tontz) has come home after getting her MBA, in the hopes that she’ll be running things there soon.

But during the rehearsal dinner, Carolina’s fiance reveals that the hotel has been sold to his company. Of course, Alicia and Javi are pissed, thinking Gigi, who Javi calls a “vulture” (she was best friends with Mendoza’s first wife, and they came together after she died), think she was behind the sale.

That’s when all hell breaks loose. Carolina gets jealous when the hotel’s VIP guest, El Rey (Jencarlos Canela) wants to be with her “ugly” and “fat” twin sister Yoli (Justina Adorno), who is neither of those things, so she sleeps with him the night before her wedding. Alicia sees it and after overhearing Gigi and Carolina conspire about it the next day, he tells the fiance, who sparks a brawl during the wedding when he tells the truth. With the deal off, Mendoza tells Alicia why he wanted to sell: The hotel was hemorrhaging money, and the people he borrowed from to keep it afloat weren’t from the bank.

Meanwhile, a new waiter named Danny (Lincoln Younes) tails Jason Parker (Chris Warren), who has been with the hotel forever because his mother Helen (Wendy Raquel Robinson) is in charge of the staff. Danny takes a liking to Alicia, who bends his ear about the hotel’s problems one night when he thinks she’s drowning (long story), but he’s got other reasons to be there. Then there’s Mateo (Shalim Ortiz), who everyone thinks is Mendoza’s right-hand man, but he’s at the hotel for other reasons. He finds out that troubled maid Ingrid (Anne Winters), with who Jason is in love, is carrying his child. He wants it “taken care of”, but she has other ideas, and finds the exact person to take responsibility, even if the child isn’t his.

Our Take: Based on a Spanish series, Grand Hotel is a classic telenovela, with intersecting storylines, lots of twists and turns, and no one being who they seem to be. Eva Longoria is one of the executive producers and directs an episode; Brian Tanen, who is a veteran of shows like Ugly Betty and Devious Maids, developed this concept for ABC. So there is a ton of experience with the format behind this show. Which is why it was so disappointing to see the show not be nearly as campy as it could have been, at least in its first episode.

When the show gets campy, like during the brawl scene at Carolina’s wedding, the show is extremely entertaining. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them in the pilot. During the scenes where characters are talking to one another, you can see the show taking itself far too seriously, making it feel like Tanen and his writers were going for a more traditional American primetime soap format (which, of course, can also get campy, but with more of a straight face than telenovelas do). Instead, we were left longing for some more comedic scenes that brought on the high drama and twists, and we just didn’t get many.

The other problem is that Bichir, an Oscar nominee who also stood out on FX’s The Bridge, feels like he’s playing chess, acting-wise, while the rest of the cast is playing checkers. Not saying that this material is below Bichir — if Meryl Streep can kick ass in Big Little Lies, anything’s possible — but even veterans like Sanchez don’t hold a candle to him when they’re in scenes with him. That disparity is glaring and takes us out of the world that this show is trying to build.

One thing we can say is that many American telenovelas, even the revered Jane The Virgin, had bumpy stars of various quality. With the experienced hands behind Grand Hotel, things should get better. We just hope that it turns around quickly.

Sex and Skin: This is ABC; there’s some sex, mostly involving Javi, but nothing too bawdy.

Parting Shot: As the principals walk around the hotel in slow motion, we hear a voice over talking about what he might do when he finds out what happened to his sister, the missing line cook.

Sleeper Star: Can we have a show about Yoli? In her limited scenes, Adorno did a fine job of making Yoli a complete character, under the heel of her prettier twin sister her whole life, despite being very attractive herself and, more importantly, not evil. When she pushes Carolina in the pool when her sister tries to apologize, we laughed out loud.

Most Pilot-y Line: Why on God’s green earth would someone get turned on by looking at Javi’s stump while they’re having sex? We’d be even angrier than he was as she tried to take off the sock that was covering it.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only because we see potential in Grand Hotel. Bichir is a surprisingly appealing telenovela lead, though the rest of the cast needs to come up to his level. It can be a fun summer watch if later episodes take themselves less seriously and really start to flow like a telenovela should.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.