Spyder Games is, beyond a doubt, the weirdest series MTV has ever aired–for the mere reason that MTV is airing it.

To wit (or, in this case, witless): If the 130-part youth-appeal soap opera had been on some other cable channel (such as Oxygen or Lifetime) or in broadcast-channel syndication, it would clearly be nothing more or less than the poorly-written, poorly-acted, shot-on-video mediocrity it is.

But by being on MTV, where everything’s allegedly so slick and quick and hot, the show’s wooden acting and cardboard sets take on a nearly surrealistic tone. It’s as if the channel’s top brass had finally realized that 20 years of incessant, aggressive programming (not to mention five years of hyping awful boy bands and all-white gangsta rappers) have made it a spent force among wide swaths of its target audience–a Dawson’s Creek generation with little interest in a Beavis and Butt-head aesthetic.

So Spyder Games doesn’t try to be hip–or rather, whenever it tries to be hip it fails miserably, making its fundamental squareness even more apparent. The rock band some of the characters have is relentlessly average. The costumes are off-the-shelf mall-chain recreations of the worst ’80s-style homeliness. The dialogue makes no discernable attempt at contempo slang. The storylines are supposedly about hidden family secrets, but in detail are nearly incomprehensible to first-time viewers.

In other words, it’s a standard regular-issue daytime soap, differentiated from the network fare only in that (1) it’s more incompenetly made, and (2) it will end after 26 weeks, like a Mexican telenovela.

To compare and contrast, MTV’s running the second season of its Undressed serial after some showings of Spyder Games. Undressed features perky college kids, stripped to their glamorous undies as often as possible, chattering on about sex and relationships. (In keeping with today’s reversed double standards, the gals are usually the ones obsessed with sex while the guys want to pontificate about relationships.) Everybody’s “beautiful” and stylish, and the show uses that muddy digital process to make video supposedly look like film.

Neither show is very good, or very entertaining. But despite (or because of) its incessant hotness, Undressed already seems more dated than last year’s Victoria’s Secret catalog; while Spyder Games, invoking 50 years of TV soap opera histrionics, is a relative evergreen.