B-Listers In The Sun

It has become almost a rite of passage for a bright-and-about-to-be star to play the child/nephew/charge of someone who was once, too, a star in his or her youth.

What this means for the younger actor is a brand association, of course. What, Sean Faris play scion of DB Sweeney in Life As We Know It? Or the delectable Chad Michael Murray the son of Moira Kelly in One Tree Hill? Wow, either one -- or both -- could have been the real-life children of the elder acting pair, who lived happily ever as their careers crested at the top of B-list village after co-starring together in The Cutting Edge, a forgettable date movie about an unlikely couple teaming up for the unlikelier sport of figure skating.

Then there is the once-delectable Ione Skye, who played the object of John Cusack's affections in every Gen-Xer's favourite romantic chick flick, Say Anything. Described by one character in Cameron Crowe's movie as a rocket scientist "trapped in the body of a game show host", she recently poked her head out of a trailer food truck, and almost into the waiting face of Sweeney, again on Life As We Know It.

You can't even play six degrees of separation with these names the way you can with bona fide '80s stars like Kevin Bacon, Keifer Sutherland or James Spader -- who incidentally, when they show up on television on in films, do not deign to take pussy parts like that of parental sidekicks. They take home Emmys, not just a paycheck.

There is, of course, the theatre solution -- the preferred choice of '80s hasbeens. For teen singsation Debbie Gibson, best known to those who tried so hard to do-like-that-Electric Youth-girl for perfecting the art of the side-worn ponytail with gel-frozen bangs, Grease is the word.

But even when Grease is more like a byword, too, the stage works. Pleasantly surprising is Maxwell Caulfield's appearance in My Deah, an off-Broadway -- and very effective -- pisstake of Medea, set somewhere in the deep South, far left of Louisiana. Cut like Adonis, Caulfield emotes about as well as he flexes his torso. Such a comeback, after his much-panned turn in Grease II opposite Michelle Pfeiffer.

Perhaps it is because some B (for "Bad") listers never quite knew what to do with their fame.

Skye, for instance, might have had as many opportunities after Say Anything as her co-star Cusack, who went on to hone his neurotic-tragic hero shtick to perfection and appears to have projects lined up for the next six to eight years at least. Rather, relegated to the Lost World Of The Enduring Sidekicks, she appears most effectively in supporting roles to such talents as Drew Barrymore (Fever Pitch) or alas, regressed parts such as "Food Stand Woman" in Life As We Know It.

Ms Kelly's case is similarly soured, in light of her being named by John Willis' Screen World as one of 12 "Promising New Actors in 1992" in back in her day. In those years since then, she never quite hit the pace or pitch she needed to get her name up there with the likes of Teri Hatcher or Courtney Cox, both of whom are four years her senior but look decidedly radiant compared to Kelly's corseted single mother on One Tree Hill, who lives in a self-imposed dating prison strangely similar to a real-life self-imposed acting confinement of sorts.

Sweeney, meanwhile, has had his share of good roles, from earlier roles in movie classic Memphis Belle to more recent appearances in CSI: Miami. Yet he seems to have a snuff effect on any kind of TV drama series involving emo-geeks-grown-up, such as Karen Cisco and, well, Life As We Know It.

Coincidence? Perhaps not...