'Starter Wife' on the rebound
The second time around isn't quite as giddy-gleeful spontaneous for "The Starter Wife," but it never is.
Debra Messing's miniseries about a Hollywood divorcee returns as an ever-so-slightly longer regular hourlong series with a double episode at 8 p.m. Friday on USA. Messing remains every bit as appealing as she was back in her "Will & Grace" days, but the show itself goes soft as it tries to pad out its premise.
You've heard of the seven-year itch? Well, "The Starter Wife" produces a seven-minute itch: A viewer wants to click the remote every seven minutes, just to stay awake.
Messing plays Molly Kagan, ex-wife of a Hollywood movie producer who dumped her and their 7-year-old daughter. "I once lived in a state of ignorant bliss," she says to start, and the series, like the miniseries before it, concerns her voyage of discovery as an independent woman.
Unfortunately, this being series television, it has to create conflict, of course, so the first of the 10 new episodes, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin Queen," finds Molly dreaming of herself in Elizabethan garb and declaring, "I am swearing off men."
Having already worked her way through Joe Mantegna as a Hollywood nabob and "True Blood" vampire studmuffin Stephen Moyer as an irresistibly sexy homeless guy (only in El Lay), Molly makes an admirable and probably overdue resolution. Yet how long can it last in a medium as sex-obsessed as TV? If you guess less than a full episode, you're correct, Aware One.
That's because, after Molly's children's picture book has flopped, she tries to get her writing life back on track by joining a workshop taught by Hart Bochner's alluring Zach. This also leads to some new developments besides the romantic interest.
Molly's children's book doesn't go over any better with the workshop than it did with kids. So she brings in her journal and finds them all laughing at her offhand observations on Hollywood hypocrisy and its entrenched pop-culture caste system.
Let me interrupt first of all to say the writing staff misses a terrific opportunity to skewer writers' workshops, which tend to make a piranha feeding frenzy look like afternoon tea at the Drake Hotel. Yet that's because the writers are perhaps too entranced with their own writing.
Molly's glib observations are wry enough one time through, but when the script has her repeat them again, well, not to sound like a jaded husband, but it makes you want to reach for the mute button because you've heard it all before. It doesn't help that when she reads the same exact passage to multiple characters, they laugh at the same moments in the same way, as if stuck in laugh-track mode.
Enter the intrigue when Molly's journal get stolen at a Hollywood party (as if, again only in El Lay, no, make that only in a fictional El Lay), and the entries, complete with her tell-all naming names of rich and famous kleptomaniacs and other scandalous spouses, begin turning up in a local publication under the byline of "The Hollywood Ex-Wife."
It's "The Starter Wife" trying to be "Gossip Girl," and it comes off as a desperate mother trying to share the same Abercrombie & Fitch clothing with her daughter.
It's a pity because there's plenty to work with here, and it's largely squandered. Judy Davis is back as Molly's older gal pal, Joan, but the subplot about her taking a job with a celebrity drunk tank is a distraction, and her scenes with Ron Cox as her husband are no better.
Chris Diamantopoulos returns as Molly's gay designer buddy, but he soon finds himself working on the down-low for an action-star client. So much for this series swearing off men.
Debra Messing might have one of the biggest names out there in prime time on Fridays, but "The Starter Wife" shouldn't steal any viewers from "The Ex List" - or "WWE Smackdown!" for that matter.