The Starter Wife: Messing Returns in Summer Mini-Series

The highly quotable and potential Emmy nominee (as dark of a dark horse as they come) The Starter Wife, starring the Emmy award winning Debra Messing (formerly of Will and Grace), as the night's ads perpetually reminded, premiered May 31. The six-episode mini-series about Messing's character Molly's life as a recently removed "starter wife" - someone only appended to her husband and therefore likely to be quickly discarded once someone better (younger) comes along - provides a clever yet approachable vantage point on Hollywood A-list culture, in which apparently natural equals crap.

After an opening title sequence that blatantly draws from Desperate Housewives, Starter Wife gives its viewers perfect comedic timing, some might call it ironic timing, by darting around and throwing daggers with tongue-in-cheek. After Molly and her riotous friends, from biffle Cricket to gay boyfriend Rodney to aged alcoholic Joan, bemoan the vapidity and unwarranted elitism of the red carpet world, they burst into giddy giggles because Molly can get them all into the hottest new event, proving that it's their red carpet world. Later, Molly's prominent producer husband Kenny asks her to deliver his mail after informing her that he wants a divorce. While part of an endeavor to try new things to heal her fractured self, Molly finds herself rowing into the ocean screaming, "I'm an athlete!" and wearing designer sunglasses. Then a wave smacks her back to reality. It's almost too ironically unexpected, to the point of surrealism, but that just makes it all the better.

Add some attractive love interests, reminiscent of cloned Sex and the City stock. A shirtless, nameless (much later revealed to be Sam) hottie rescues Molly after her near drowning incident that ended her rowing/kayaking life. With such character defining comments about the need to examine life as opposed to merely plowing through it, he establishes himself as a type-A Aidan-type. To fill Big's shoes: salt-and-peppered (more emphasis on the pepper), type-B Lou, weasily Kenny's producer/boss/friend, steps in to woo the recently (and quickly) divorced Molly with coyote howls and piles of money.

But Carrie's Sex and the City voiceovers always reveled in playing with puns and never approached the succinctly cynical mantra of Molly's. Messing delivers hushed, boding, monotonously disparaging voiceovers that add more crackle to the already harsh light illuminating the illustrious, star-centric world.

Throw in some clever quotes, and this show has everything to love: from sex to wordplay (far more complex wordplay than Carrie's one-dimensional puns). After listing several platitudes to help her come to terms with her new post-Kenny/marriage worldview, Molly assures the audience of her awareness of her list's vacuity by resolving, "There's a time in your life for platitudes, and this is it." And when Molly bewails the unfairness of life, after divorce socially bankrupts her, persisting, "I'm talking about right and wrong," in an attempt to further sway her friends away from their emphasis on the practical and the legal, Joan, played brilliantly with Joan-Crawford-mocking camp by Judy Davis, returns, "Well, in California -" HA! Starter Wife reveals the influences of bitingly critical and equally quotable Gigi Levangie, writer of the novel on which USA based the series.

I think we could all use some more "ironic twists," as denigrated Lou quips, in our lives. And however much USA would like to blow-off Starter Wife as one would a breezy summer fling; Starter Wife has true intelligence and staying power. Starter Wife isn't actually about being a starter wife cut out of her former home; it's about critiquing said former home, which is easiest when one has just been kicked out of it. Molly's eye-rollingly flippant dismissal of her ex's ineffectual, post-marriage sexcapades with a pop-starlet clarifies that she's beyond such nonsense of the lovelorn.

Get hooked while you can on the best merger of a movie and TV series on air (temporally and aesthetically in between). The Starter Wife, directed by Jon Avnet, airs Thursdays at 9pm on USA, but all of its episodes may be viewed online - in attempts to woo Emmy voters and bypass their requirement that they need to view all of a season's episodes in order for it to qualify for voting - as well as weekly tangential "Hollywood wives" webisodes at www.usanetwork.com/series/starterwife.