Revenge, a surprise hit for ABC created by Mike Kelley, has just the right mix of campy comedy and sudsy melodrama, not to mention a narrative excitement that keeps you perched on the edge of your couch cushion. It doesn’t hurt that the whole thing looks gorgeous, from its lovingly detailed Hamptons settings (shot mainly in Manhattan Beach, California) to its gleaming cast. The show, returning for its second season this month, stars Emily VanCamp as a scheming young woman whose real name is Amanda Clarke but who has chosen to go by Emily Thorne, lest her fiendish designs become known to the Hamptonites whom she hopes to dispatch to their doom for having successfully conspired to frame her dear old dad when she was but a little girl, way back in the 90s. Possessing a certain blank affect that lends a soupçon of menace to her fresh Canadian looks, the 26-year-old VanCamp successfully anchors a show perennially in danger of throwing its viewers overboard with each new blast of plot. VanCamp’s on-screen wingwomen are the fashionable Londoner Ashley Madekwe, who plays the ambitious party planner Ashley Davenport, and the California-born Christa B. Allen, whose character, the poor little rich girl Charlotte Grayson, can’t help but be a victim, despite her best efforts to enact her own revenge. Ever so loosely based on The Count of Monte Cristo, the much-adapted doorstop of a novel by Alexandre Dumas, Revenge is proving that—Downton Abbey be damned—Americans still know how to make a wicked soap opera when they set their minds to it.