"If I weren't Spelling, I would certainly recommend us," veteran producer Aaron Spelling quips. "But they picked it up because they liked it, not because they liked me, which is important. It never occurred to me, but this is the quickest pickup we've ever gotten. We did nothing but say, 'We like it.'"
"But we're really happy with a young lady named Lori Loughlin. She created the show."
"I thought about a friend of mine who works for Vogue," Loughlin says, "She's always in great clothes and fantastic shoes. I thought, 'Wow, I'd like to play a character like that.'
"So my original thought was based on this friend who goes to Europe, goes to all these cocktail parties and meets all these fabulous people and can basically handle herself in any situation except where you put her in a room with children. She does not know what she's doing.
"I thought it would be interesting to play a character that really had this fabulous life, who had her act together, but then was handed these children and just didn't know what to do with them."
In "Summerland," Loughlin plays Ava Gregory, a fashion designer who has just struck out on her own with a boutique label. She lives in a Southern California beach community somewhere north of Los Angeles (the actual filming beach is in Malibu, with homes digitally added).
Supporting her are her longtime friends: Susannah Rexford (Merrin Dungey), who's also her business partner; Johnny Durant (Shawn Christian), her ex-boyfriend, a real-estate dealer; and Australian surfer and eternal adolescent Jay Robertson (Ryan Kwanten).
Savvy viewers may take note that all the above surnames -- including that of teen character Erika Spalding, played by Christian's stepdaughter, Taylor Cole -- are streets in Beverly Hills, which happens to be Tolkin's neighborhood. Just a little in-joke, there.
When Ava's sister and brother-in-law are killed in an accident, she becomes the surrogate mother to their children -- 16-year-old Bradin (Jesse McCartney), 12-year-old Nikki (Kay Panabaker) and 8-year-old Derrick (Nick Benson) Westerly -- who must relocate to California from an isolated farm in Kansas.
"Children don't come with a guidebook," Loughlin says. "It's an everyday learning experience. I thought it would be fun to have a woman learning from the children as the children were learning from her. You have this group of young adults raising these three kids, and the theory behind it being, it takes a village to raise a child."
The choice of the beach was both an aesthetic and dramatic decision.
"I thought it meant a lot to be on the beach," Spelling says. "Once we deal with the down thing -- the parents dying, how they were killed, the kids who don't know what they're going into, and she doesn't -- the beach felt good.
"It's one thing to go from Kansas to another Kansas, but going from Kansas to the beach offered something to the audience, so it didn't get them down."
It also offers the opportunity for women in bikinis.
"What a great idea," Spelling says. "Golly, I've been wearing about six of them already, just to see how they feel."
The original one-hour pilot made Ava a lawyer, but Spelling had other ideas. "I took a chance of her hating me for something I did," he says, "and it was really nice to hear that she loved it, and we're doing it. The original was perfect except for one thing -- she was a lawyer.
"What's she going to do, leave the kids every time she gets a case? It was the only thing that bothered me, and the network said, 'You can't change it.' 'Why can't you change it?' 'Don't you think she'll be upset?' 'Well, we'll see.' I changed it, and she loved it."
"For me," Tolkin says, "it was a thrill and a rare opportunity to go back and fix everything you wish you'd done differently. We changed the profession from an attorney to a fashion designer, which was a lot more fun and more appropriate for the character of a free spirit living in a beach house."
"Also," Aubuchon adds, "I was done with writing about lawyers. Also, one of the things we got to do once we were faced with opening it up again was a chance to really deepen each character's story.
"Obviously, Lori Loughlin's our star, and we wanted to make sure we understood her and her friends a lot better before they are suddenly faced with the situation of inheriting these three children."
As to the inevitable comparisons to "The O.C.," Tolkin says, "I happen to be a big fan. Remi knows. He teases me mercilessly. I love the Vegas; I love the Nana. But 'The O.C.' is a soap. We're not a soap. We're a family show. It's a story built out of little emotional moments that become big emotional moments."
