Fox gives birth to a spawn-of-the-devil soap

The new Fox series “Point Pleasant” sounds like a daytime soap, and in some senses it is. In some senses, it’s also like “The O.C.” and “The Omen” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Beverly Hills 90210” and “The Craft.”

I hesitate even to call it a show -- it’s more like the skin of other shows and movies peeled off and stitched together to create a new show, like the serial killer’s home project in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

The setup: Mysterious teenager arrives in seaside New Jersey idyll (actually, she falls from the sky into the Atlantic, then is rescued by a cute-boy lifeguard after a storm, but I digress). Soon she’s wearing a halter top and upsetting the order of things. As the press notes describe the mystery girl’s effect on the town of Point Pleasant, “Her presence awakens repressed feelings, unlocks suppressed desires and heightens emotions among the residents.” Just say it, Fox: People are going to start sleeping with each other with “Melrose Place”-like alacrity.

Who is this comely lass with the creepy, aphrodisiac powers? Christina (Elisabeth Harnois) “is the child of darkness, and she’s under his protection now.” The actor speaking this line, seated on a park bench with another shadowy figure in the pilot, is Grant Show, ex of (hey!) “Melrose Place.” In “Point Pleasant,” he plays some sort of agent to the devil, who is Christina’s father. Christina’s mother is mortal, and she’s come to Point Pleasant to find her.

The gothic, supernatural stuff, used both metaphorically and for comedic effect in “Buffy,” just sits there in the pilot of “Point Pleasant.” “Buffy” used the vampire shtick to make comments about peer pressure, family, boy problems. But “Point Pleasant,” created by Marti Noxon, who wrote on “Buffy” and its spinoff “Angel,” lacks a stylistic imprint and, more important, a sense that you could become invested in the layers the show will gradually reveal. Unlike, say, “Lost,” which suggested all sorts of otherworldly possibilities in its pilot, “Point Pleasant” in its kickoff episode makes the devil seem like one of those removed, Shearson-Lehman CEO trust fund dads in Greenwich, Conn., who pack their girls off to boarding school early and generally withhold approval.

Christina, anyway, has the dazed, emotionally deprived look of an abandoned rich girl. She also has a thing in her eye, a “666” logo that enables her to enact fury, so that could explain it.

Unable to create suspense or dread around the Satan angle, the show is left to concern itself with teen angst, a girl who wants the unavailable boy (who is occupied by the village hottie) and who is meanwhile trying to find her mother while steering clear of her omniscient but absentee father. In the pilot episode, she gets folded into a stunted nuclear family, the Kramers, whom Christina will change.

Like a soap opera plot point, she will also, probably, pull the cute boy, Jesse (Sam Page), away from the hottie, Paula (Cameron Richardson). “It’s just, you look so good ... for a floater, um, victim,” Jesse tells Christina after their meet-cute: He, the lifeguard, braving the swirling seas, she down, or up, from whence she came. It’s a neat little moment, like a very special “Baywatch.”

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‘Point Pleasant’

Where: Fox

When: 9-10 p.m. premiere tonight, then regularly on Thursdays.

Ratings: TBA

Elisabeth Harnois...Christina Nickson

Sam Page...Jesse Parker

Richard Burgi...Ben Kramer

Susan Walters...Meg Kramer

Aubrey Dollar...Judy Kramer

Executive producers Marti Noxon, Dawn Parouse, Marty Adelstein, Neal Moritz.