There’s more than just a ‘B’ in ABC’S ‘Apt. 23’
Other characters will develop this season
Don’t Trust the B - - - - in Apt. 23 gives roommates a bad name: Chloe.
The brazen bad girl (Krysten Ritter), her once wide-eyed roommate, June (Dreama Walker), and best friend (and real celeb), James Van Der Beek, return tonight (ABC, 9:30 ET/ PT) after a seven-episode late-season run last spring.
“We want to have fun with these characters, have people see how out- rageous and irreverent and a little bit dangerous they are,” creator Nahnatchka Khan says. As the season progresses, “we’ll have some fun little growths for June, Chloe (and) James.” But don’t expect Chloe’s sharp edges to soften too much: “You can’t have a bad girl and not make her bad.”
“Chloe is so over the top,” Ritter says of her enthusiastically amoral character, who pushes booze and sex to extremes, fixed up an unsuspecting June with her married father and took in a foster child because she wanted an assistant. “She’s a sociopath.”
Dawson’s Creek heartthrob Van Der Beek, who plays “a fictional, demented version” of himself, says the only thing the two have in common is “a few things on their résumés.”
In the season premiere, Apt. 23 (which ranked 12th in young-adult viewers among last year’s 58 new shows) torches Van Der Beek’s ties to the legendary teen soap. “I feel like we have fun with the Dawson’s stuff because it’s there. ( We) have the most fun making up stuff out of thin air,” including a Dancing With the Stars story line and a movie role in which he falls in love with a giant pink puppet.
In an art-imitating-life moment, an upcoming episode will link Van Der Beek with People’s Sexiest Man Alive, an issue in which he’ll appear.
And odd-couple Chloe and June, who already have started rubbing off on each other, will “affect each other in a very slight way,” Khan says. Polar opposites “find a bit of similarity.”