Like Its Title Character, 'Starter Wife' Gets Old Fast

"The Starter Wife" is predicated on the premise that Hollywood is a lot like high school, only with couture and high-end champagne. You can be popular one day, unpopular the next, all depending upon your accouterments.

And if you're one of that select segment of Hollywood society known as "wife of," the primary accouterment is your powerful husband -- preferably a producer, though a director may have to suffice. These are women who tweeze, squeeze and wax themselves into submission in order to marry into money, fame, power -- and, apparently, the mean girls' table at the best lunchrooms in town.

But it's a precarious existence. Lose that man, and you might as well stop flat-ironing your hair.

Fortysomething Molly Kagan (played by Debra Messing) learns this after she gets dumped by her power-producer husband via speakerphone and finds out that divorce, Hollywood-style, comes with a lot more than property settlements and custody battles. Suddenly, she's being shunned at six-figure children's birthday parties, can't get a table at the right restaurants and is no longer welcome at charity event-planning powwows.

The twist behind "Starter Wife" is that it's based on a novel by a woman clearly poking fun at her own universe: Gigi Levangie Grazer, "wife of" Hollywood titan Brian Grazer. She somehow managed to satirize those around her, get a bestseller out of it, and not end up a starter wife herself.

With Messing as the lead and the fabulous Judy Davis, martini glass in hand, playing one of her inner circle, the casting far exceeds the bar for a summer cable miniseries. And the slick skewering of Hollywood's foibles is quite fun . . . for a while.

Alas, the story takes a quick detour and becomes something akin to "Desperate Housewives" living in "The O.C." Molly flees to a borrowed Malibu manse for the summer. From that point on, the plotlines head straight for the suds. A potential murder! A wacky attempt to spring a friend from rehab! A new potential love interest with a murky past and no platinum credit cards (to put it mildly)!

Peter Jacobson plays Molly's soon-to-be-ex, the kind of guy who thinks it's perfectly fine to screen "Jaws" for his 5-year-old right before she goes to live at the beach. He's already replaced Molly with pop-tart Shoshanna (Trilby Glover), much to his starter wife's horror.

Besides Davis, Molly's pals include Miranda Otto as Cricket, who truly has a heart of gold (a fact we're supposed to know from the start because she has a Brangelina-like brood of adopted children). Rodney (Chris Diamantopoulos), a gay interior designer, completes the foursome. Diamantopoulos isn't great, but then again, when your subplot involves trying to unload a set of ugly chairs, there isn't much to work with.

It's talents like Messing (who is more likable and less shrill here than she was in "Will & Grace") and Davis who save this six-hour miniseries from disaster. Not that the network doesn't do its best to drive viewers away with abundant (and abundantly annoying) product placement. A drinking game that required viewers to take a shot every time a brand-name item is blatantly mentioned would be lethal. We'd list some of the offenders here, but they're already getting their two seconds of fame. And the major tie-in with a particular line of beauty products that are supposed to keep us looking younger? Talk about a reverse effect. All that cringing it induces can't be good for the crow's feet.

Then again, it's kind of nice to see a summer beach cast with a few crow's feet of their own.

The Starter Wife airs its first two hours tonight at 9 on USA Network. It continues over the next four Thursday nights.