Tried and New

Though the new WB series “JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment” and “Glory Days” are geared for the teen and young adult audience the network has cultivated, the shows actually are throwbacks to vintage TV genres.

“With both ‘Jamie Kennedy’ and ‘Glory Days,’ we are trying to do something that has been sort of standard operating procedure at the WB since Day 1, which is to identify durable programming genres that have not been reintroduced to younger adult audiences,” says Jordan Levin, president of entertainment for the WB.

In the case of “Jamie Kennedy,” which can be seen Sundays at 8 p.m., the half-hour series is “introducing the practical joke-variety show and the ‘Candid Camera’ format. And with ‘Glory Days,’ it is introducing a real old-fashioned murder mystery-whodunit that has been really popular on CBS, but hasn’t gotten aged down.” Both shows were introduced last week.

“Glory Days,” shown Wednesdays at 9 p.m., is the second series for the WB from executive producer and creator Kevin Williamson, of “Dawson’s Creek” and the “Scream” movies. Eddie Cahill plays Mike Dolan, a young novelist who returns to his hometown of Glory after “loosely” basing his best-selling murder mystery on the events surrounding his father’s accidental death. The beautiful Pacific Northwest town is filled with murder and other grisly goings on. Every week, Dolan, the coroner (Poppy Montgomery) and the sheriff (Jay R. Ferguson) will be solving a mystery.

“On the one hand, it is a very bare bones whodunit, but the whodunits are creepy and the characters are a little quirky,” Levin says. “There is a very contained sense of what this town is and the rules it organizes itself by, which has a little bit of ‘Northern Exposure’ and ‘Picket Fences’ to it.”

As well as a dash of “Twin Peaks.” Williamson, though, is quick to note that “Glory Days” is much more accessible than the cult David Lynch series.

Williamson’s original concept for the series was a coming-of-age soap opera with a lot of weird happenings in the town of Glory. It was WB executives, he says, who suggested introducing murder. “They said, ‘You wanted things to happen; how weird can you take it?’” he says. “I am discovering week to week how weird we can go. So it is sort of evolving.”

Some episodes of the 13-week series are straight-ahead mysteries, says Williamson, whereas others are quirky and emotional. “We keep everything sort of relatable,” he says. “In order to make it accessible and real, we have weird stuff happen, but we try to scientifically explain it. But if we can’t, we sort of leave it up to the audience.”

In the case of “Jamie Kennedy,” says Levin, “we wanted to do a personality-driven vehicle. We didn’t want to do something that was ultimately mean-spirited. We wanted to do something that really blended a lot of different programming forms--a celebrity-driven, non-scripted vehicle in the sort of variety show type of vein.”

Kennedy, a stand-up comic who has appeared in “Scream” and “Three Kings,” is having a ball playing everyone from a Malibu rapper meeting his girlfriend’s disapproving mother and sister to an executive who has had major jaw surgery, trying to conduct an interview.

“I am a huge fan of ‘Candid Camera’ and ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Kennedy says. “Peter Sellers is my idol, and [like him] I love playing many different characters. This show is a good chance to do it. We get to act off of real people.”

“JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment” can be seen Sundays at 8 p.m., “Glory Days” Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on the WB. The network has rated this week’s episode of “Jamie Kennedy” TV-PG-D-L (may be unsuitable for younger children, with an advisory for suggestive dialogue and coarse language) and “Glory Days” TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for younger children, with an advisory for violence).