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Television review

In time-traveling ‘Hindsight,’ VH1 makes a scripted effort

Laura Ramsey (left) and Sarah Goldberg in VH1’s time-traveling comedy-drama “Hindsight.”VH1

It’s a pleasure to find that those networks that have been dragged down by their ugly addiction to reality TV are still able to dream of scripts. While they’re in the gutter with “Lottery”-like elimination rounds, hot-tub nooky, and table-flipping fights, they’re actually still hoping for carefully prewritten words divided into scenes and acts that tell human stories. The story of Brandy Shnooki Thunderpump isn’t human so much as extraterrestrial; she is a synthetic visitor from the planet of Dermasteel in the galaxy of Lipplump.

“Hindsight” is another VH1 attempt at a scripted comedy-drama series, after the success of the basketball drama “Hit the Floor,” and it’s not a bad effort. It’s certainly less forced and misguided than Bravo’s first scripted show, “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce,” which premiered late last year. The VH1 series, which premieres on Wednesday night at 10, is slight, but it has a certain charm and the potential to grow into a harmless, soapy amusement. It lands somewhere on the romcom spectrum between a Matthew McConaughey movie from the 2000s and a CW coming-of-age series.

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Let me say right off that “Hindsight” is a time-travel show. Often, that means you are going to spend far too much time distractedly pondering the way that time and events work, and whether the time traveler would want to change things and therefore jeopardize his or her existence, and so on and so forth. “Hindsight” is far too basic to raise those questions; it’s not really concerned with science fiction. I didn’t find myself in a loop of logic about fate while watching the premiere, mainly because it’s all so loosey-goosey casual. “Lost” it’s not.

Becca (Laura Ramsey), nearing 40, is about to get married for a second time, when she has a crisis of heart. She was so wrong about her first husband, she wonders if she’s making yet another romantic error. “Did he set me on fire?” she thinks about her fiance in a voice-over. “Well, I was warm.” After a run-in with a mysterious guy at a newsstand — and shame on you, VH1 and show creator Emily Fox, for relying on the “magical Negro” stereotype — she wakes up to find herself in 1995. It’s the eve of her first wedding, and she has the chance for a do-over. She reconnects with her old friend Lolly (Sarah Goldberg), she gets to reassess her first fiance, Sean (Craig Horner), before the ceremony, and she gets to see her parents before their divorce.

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Her mother, played by Donna Murphy, is horridly superficial, constantly poking about the gorgeous Becca for eating too much. “She may be tiny but you know how she bloats,” she says. She’s fun to hate.

“Hindsight” is buoyed by a long list of pop culture references. Once Becca returns to 1995, we hear Liz Phair and the Cranberries on the soundtrack, and we see O.J. Simpson on the tube television. Becca tells Lolly that she is from the future, and then alerts her friend to one of the most important facts of the post-millennial world: Patrick Dempsey is hot again. There’s smoking in bars, AOL on everyone’s computer, clogs on people’s feet, and Susan Powter infomercials filling in the programming gaps — the kinds of insanity that won’t stop for a few more years.


Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.

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