Belles, Beaches, and Blood

Where Shores is all sunshine and acne angst, Kindred is an hour of dark and creepy proportions. In other words, it should have ''cult following'' written all over it. What the vampire drama does share with Shores is Fear of the Wrong Time Slot. Spelling would have preferred to follow Melrose on Mondays; Fox will probably give him Wednesdays at 9, after 90210. Fox executive vice president Robert Greenblatt says either way Kindred gets ''that predominantly female audience that's in the mood for this kind of show.'' And Spelling is giving the network the benefit of the doubt. ''Would I rather it had been after Melrose? Yeah,'' he says. ''But young people are gonna like this show, so maybe [Fox is] smarter than I am. Maybe following 90210 is better.''

There's one thing everyone has agreed on from the start: The vampire drama is definitely not family-hour material. ''It's very sexual,'' says star C. Thomas Howell, ''and it's gross. We're making love in one scene and decapitating someone in the next.''

Howell plays a homicide detective who tries to keep the vampires that inhabit San Francisco from baring their fangs. He maintains an uneasy truce with the Prince of the City, Julian Luna (Mark Frankel), the ''godfather'' of five secret vampire clans, each with its own personality: The Ventrue, for example, are Kennedy-style blue bloods; the artists' clan goes by the Torreadors; and the rocker/ biker types call themselves the Gangrels. ''All that stuff with funny accents and fangs and sleeping in dirt was just tired,'' says Kindred creator John Leekley. ''I went back to what vampires were always about, which is humans fearing the id set free — sexuality and violence.''

But not enough violence to get a V-chip advocate's knickers in a knot, according to Greenblatt. ''There's hardly any killing at all. We've softened some of the rules about vampires. In order for them to survive, they feed without killing. People don't meet horrible, gruesome deaths.'' Decapitations excepted.

So far, Fox has ordered seven episodes of Kindred, in addition to the 90-minute pilot; NBC has requested six episodes of Malibu Shores. But just in case they both end up high and dry, never fear: Spelling has plenty more soap to sell, including, he says, ''a pilot about mounted police in Alaska.'' So who gets to wear the bikini?
— Additional reporting by Jessica Shaw