American Heiress [TV Series] (2007)

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The sixth of the prime time "novelas" offered by the fledgling MyNetwork service, American Heiress was based on the Spanish-language TVAzteca soap opera (La Heredera--and could just as easily have been retitled "The Perils of Elizabeth." Alice Leigh Willis starred as toothsome young heiress Elizabeth Wakefield, whose adventures began when her family's private jet crashed in a Guatemalan rain forest. Surviving the wreck, the pampered Elizabeth was forced to battle the elements with her fellow survivor, hard-bitten pilot J.D. Bruce (Carter MacIntyre). Ultimately returning to civilization, Elizabeth found that her troubles were far from over: Her imperious father Lionel (John Aprea) was dead set against her romance with the charismatic J.D., while her scheming older brother Damian (Race Owen)--who may very well have engineered the plane crash--was tireless in his efforts to claim the entire family fortune for himself, leaving his siblings out in the cold. The other characters were similarly drawn with broad, unsubtle strokes, especially the resident "easy" girl Loren (AnnaLynne McCord). Debuting March 13, 2007 and initially planned as a 65-episode series to be run on a nightly basis, American Heiress was quickly pared down to 22 weekly installments thanks to MyNetwork's ever-plummeting ratings (the network would soon abandon original "fictional" programming entirely in favor of a docket of new reality series and old movies). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi