EDEN was a softcore television series that debuted on The Playboy Channel in 1993, and lasted for one season of 12 episodes. It was a half-hour show that took place on a tropical island resort called, obviously, Eden.

The series starred Barbara Alyn Woods as Eve Sinclair, who runs Eden. The premise is that Eve’s husband Grant used to own the resort, but when he died in a tragic boating accident two years prior to the series, he left her 51% ownership of Eden, with his brother Josh owning the other 49%. But the plot-twist is that Grant’s Will stated that if Eve didn’t get remarried within 2 years after his death, full ownership and control would go to Josh.

I’m no lawyer, but this sounds legally dubious to me, but at the very least it’s pretty manipulative. Yet Eve doesn’t hold it against Grant, she thinks he had her best wishes at art, and just wanted to make sure that she moved on after his death.

The problem is that Eve is still in heavy mourning for Grant, and can’t even think of any other man. Most episodes that she’s in feature one intense fantasy sequence in which Eve imagines that she sees Grant (who is played by Jeff Griggs) and speaks to him as if he’s still alive before having sex with him, until she abruptly snaps back to reality with disappointment. Meanwhile Josh, played by Steve Chase, who was previously living and working in San Francisco, moves to Eden to run it with Eve, and makes no secret of his own desire to be with Eve, but she playfully brushes him off as she just thinks of him as “Grant’s little brother.” This ongoing drama forms the underlying plotline of the series

Also starring as a regular on the show was Jack Armstrong, an aspiring musician and songwriter who works at Eden as a cabana boy/snorkeling coach, and Darcy DeMoss as Randi, the little sister of Eve’s former roommate, who joins the cast in the 2nd episode to work as a fitness coach in Eden’s gym. B.D. and Darcy have various encounters, mostly sexual, with guests who pass through the resort.

In addition to the Eden employees’ storylines, several characters pass through the series as visitors to Eden, with their own dramatic plotlines that they must deal with.

In the first episode (written by Stephen Black and Henry Stern and directed by Victor Lobl), we meet Christoph M. Ohrt and Elizabeth Lambert as Ian and Victoria, who are at Eden to celebrate their 10th anniversary. But also there is Diana Barton as Ian’s former mistress Andrea. Ian had recently broken it off with Andrea and is trying to make his marriage work, but Andrea won’t give up so easily, which is why she followed him to Eden. Ian is surprised when Andrea approaches him in the Eden Gym early one morning, and insists that their affair is over. But when she follows him into the men’s locker room and strips naked, he can’t resist her and they have sex. We later see that these conflicted feelings Ian has are making it difficult for him to have sex with his wife, as he and Victoria start to have sex in their room, but he just can’t finish. Later, after confronting Andrea again, and handing her a $100k check to get her to leave, we see him and Victoria back in their room trying to have sex again. But just as it’s getting going, the phone rings, and for some crazy reason Ian actually picks it up, right in the middle of having sex, and it’s Andrea taunting him about if he’s inside Victoria at that moment and asks how it feels. Ian hangs up, but these obviously kills the mood and again he can’t finish with Victoria.

B.D. meets two ladies, Lacey and Marney (Jill Pierce and Kristen Fontaine), who are good friends staying at Eden together, and both sign up to take snorkeling lessons from him. That night Lacey approaches B.D. while he’s getting off work and goes back to his room, where they have sex.

The episode ends with Eve holding a picture of her and Grant as she goes to sleep.

It’s a decent enough opening episode to the series, but rewatching it now for the first time after a couple of decades, I’ll say it’s not quite as erotic as I remembered it. The various sex scenes were relatively short. Of course, as a teenager, just seeing naked women on TV was exciting enough. But now comparing it to other softcore shows from the 1990s, it feels more like a mainstream show that happens to have nudity in it. This is something you’d see at 9pm on Sunday nights on HBO or Showtime rather than late-night Cinemax. But the cast are all great actors, and it’s well-written.  Josh comes off a bit cringier than I recall the way he’s blatantly hitting on Eve. I’m like, dude, that’s your brother’s widow. At one point he brings up the provision about ownership in Grant’s Will and says he thinks that’s manipulative, because it’s Grant trying to control her life from beyond the grave (again, I agree), and she shouldn’t have to deal with the pressure of getting remarried to just to maintain ownership of the resort. And I’m thinking, well, could you just pledge to sign the ownership rights back to Eve, if you get them. But this will come up in later episodes of the season…

Chacebook rating: THREE STARS

Jason Majercik is selling the UNRATED DVD of EDEN for $19.99. Email him at quinn_nash@hotmail.com for his softcore inventory list.