First look at ‘90210’ spinoff hints at family ties

LOS ANGELES - Meet the Mills, the three-generational Beverly Hills clan at the center of the CW’s contemporary “Beverly Hills, 90210” spinoff.

A detailed breakdown for the pilot, released Monday night, sheds more light on the plot and the characters of the untitled show.

Rob Thomas (”Dawson’s Creek,” “Veronica Mars”) is writing the spinoff, which, like the original “90210,” revolves around a family with two teen kids the same age — a boy and a girl — who recently moved from the Midwest to Beverly Hills.

But this time, the dad, Harry Mills, is a Beverly Hills High alum who moved after graduation and settled in East St. Louis. He is forced to come back when his 1970s movie star mother’s alcohol problem gets out of control. Joining him are his wife, Celia, a former Olympic medalist; biological daughter Annie; and adopted son Dixon.

The script breakdown includes five other characters, four of them 16-year-old students at West Beverly Hills High. None appears directly related to any of the characters on the original series, although 16-year-old Daphne Silver and her twentysomething brother, Max Silver, have the same last name as David Silver (Brian Austin Green), who married Donna Martin (Tori Spelling) in the original “90210” series finale.

Although Max may be too old to be David’s son, it nevertheless is intriguing that he and his sister live alone in a mansion while their parents have been “on a cruise” for as long as anyone can remember.

The spinoff also reflects the current reality at the Beverly Hills school, where about 40 percent of the students are of Persian descent: One of the students in the show is named Navid Shirazi.

To get the high-profile project ready for the network’s “upfront” presentations to advertisers in May, CW and producing studio CBS Paramount Network TV began casting before the script’s completion, a practice employed by other networks during the abbreviated post-writers’-strike pilot season.

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