Eden's Crush Hopes Popstars Outlasts Rival

May 4 -- The recent cancellation of O-Town's ABC series, Making the Band, can't be good news for Eden's Crush, the girl-group counterpart that was put together for the benefit of the WB series Popstars. But the quintet's Maile Misajon says she and the other Crushers are hoping their small-screen future is secure. "We don't know yet," she says. "We've heard talk. We'll probably be filled in soon on what is going to happen."

And although Eden's Crush is busy enough promoting its Popstars debut album without the cameras around 24-7, Misajon admits, "I miss the cameras. I miss the show itself. The show, for me, was not a big deal; it was kind of like the cameras were just there because they needed to document what we were doing. I didn't think it was strange or odd; I thought it was fine. I would love to do more episodes and have the experience and exposure. It was really fun for family and friends to see us live our daily lives on the job. It was good for people to be able to see it."

With the album's first single, "Get Over Yourself," holding up on the charts, the concert circuit beckons next for Eden's Crush. The quintet will play a spate of radio station promotional concerts during the spring before joining 'N Sync's North American tour, a high-profile break that Eden's Crush hopes will remove some of the TV-band stigma and skepticism that surrounds it.

"We didn't just get a shot; we all had been working at this our entire lives," says Misajon, who before Popstars was appearing in commercials for Monistat and McDonald's and singing in her father's cover band. "We've always worked at performing, most of us since we could walk. People are going to say what they're going to say; you have to take it with a grain of salt.

"I actually had some friends of mine saying, 'Do you know what you're getting yourself into? These people are going to try to manufacture you guys as the next girl group.' I was sort of naive to it; no, this is going to be another band, that's all. But the more I learned, the closer I read the contracts, I started going, 'You know what? They're right …' This is something put together by AOL Time Warner, the WB [network], London/Sire. It was a huge collaborative effort. But we were all doing some sort of performance activity professionally before we did this; now we just have to show people we deserve the shot we got."