Grrl TV

Episode: The Forty-Year-Old Virgin Queen
Original Air Date: October 10, 2008

Bravo! We are off to a spectacular start! It is so satisfying watching the series version of The Starter Wife, not only because we fans get to see more of our favorite characters from the miniseries, but also because this show just has great writing and acting all over the place, period. Even if you’re not into chick flicks or Grrl TV or whatever else people call entertainment targeting women, I challenge anyone who watches not to laugh at least once. The funny is definitely still there, as is the drama.

And an extra round of applause to newcomers Hart Bochner and David Alan Basche, both of whom deliver as required in every single scene. When they were first cast, I dared not hope they would be good as they’ve turned out to be, and their success is part of the reason why I’m already predicting a third season for this series.

The season opens with Molly (Debra Messing), no longer with Sam (Stephen Moyer currently stars in HBO’s True Blood), determined to make a living on her own, especially once it becomes clear that her ex-husband Kenny (Basche) is sinking all of his — and by extension, their daughter Jaden’s (Brielle Barbusca) — money into his current big-screen project Blood Canal.

To fully appreciate what Kenny’s movies are like, consider the pitch he shares with his daughter and her playmate: in a flick that’s supposed to be a cross between Tom Hanks’ Big and Bruce Willis’ Die Hard, Gene Hackman’s character wakes up to find he’s now Jake Gyllenhaal and has fifty years of intelligence experience in the body of a thirty-year-old. The name of the masterpiece? Big and Hard. Seriously. And, no, Kenny does not intend for it to be porn. That’s just how Kenny thinks.

If ideas like that aren’t persuasive enough, Molly’s need to be financially independent becomes even more urgent when the laughable Blood Canal tests poorly with audiences. Sure, Molly works her magic on a suicidal Kenny — his room a mess, he downs a whole bottle of Midol (yes, Midol!) and then wonders why he didn’t die (maybe because it wasn’t that time of the month ;-D) — and gets him back into All-Powerful Billion-Dollar Film Exec mode. But his brief flirtation with disaster reemphasizes how much greater her responsibilities are to Jaden now.

Molly’s plan for financial independence revolves around her talent for writing, hence her decision to join the writers’ group led by famous author Zach McNeill (Bochner), an Oscar nominee, single dad of Jaden’s classmate Skylar, and ex-husband of a high-powered talent agent named Joely Driver. The first meeting does not go well, however, because the other members are supposedly “serious” writers — you know, the kinds obsessed with negativity and big or melodramatic words — who don’t get her children’s book about sharks.

Thankfully, as we already know, Molly is nothing if not brave, at least after a few drinks and a heart-to-heart with her best friends Joan (Judy Davis) and Rodney (Chris Diamantopoulos). So, she returns to the writers’ group with her 93rd journal since junior high as her work in progress and proceeds to knock ‘em all dead with a really funny yet true story. It’s about the time she saw another Hollywood wife steal an expensive necklace from Barney’s (the woman slid it into the pocketbook of her unsuspecting shopping companion) while she had to pass on a great pair of boots she couldn’t afford or fit in a purse anyway.

Zach is impressed enough with Molly’s writing to set up an introduction to Jack Smiley, the editor of a prestigious magazine called Left Coast. Molly is thrilled about the opportunity to make good money from her words, too, until she realizes Smiley’s wife is the woman who shoplifted that necklace. In fact, his wife is wearing that shoplifted necklace at the party where they meet, which kind of takes the thunder out of Smiley’s insistence that Molly’s proposed observational humor column use real names.

The job never gets that far anyway because someone steals Molly’s journal out of her purse before she leaves the party. We still don’t know who the thief is, but the repercussions are immediate, drastic, and devastating. As the second episode of the season reveals, Molly’s stolen work ends up on the Dizzy-Land.com gossip website (it’s real — go ahead and click the link), and she, although currently unidentified, becomes the most hated Hollywood wife in the country. Poor Molly can’t catch a break!

She does catch a potential romance, though, because both she and Zach feel their mutual attraction to each other. If only he wasn’t presently in rebound mode with sweet young things with names like Tiffany, and she hadn’t sworn off dating, partly to protect Jaden, who took her breakup with Sam hard, as Molly later tells fellow parent Liz Marsh (Danielle Nicolet).

Accompanying subplots focus on Joan’s new job at the posh rehab facility Destinies, a part-time position her husband Pappy arranges to get her away from repainting the walls in their house in order to huff the fumes from the paint. Joan is intent on not becoming a good person just because she’s sober now, and her raging disdain for almost everyone and everything makes her terribly honest and incredibly funny.

At Destinies, she’s tasked with picking rich, often famous clients up from the airport. The very first one is fading English actor David Shea (Daniel Gerroll), who gets a nice big slap — the one shown in the promos — when he dares to grab her butt. There’s lots more where that came from because Shea is an unapologetic, incorrigible drunk who’s going to need a tough, unapologetic, and incorrigible former drunk like Joan to help him through the program. I thoroughly see the two hooking up in the future.

Meanwhile, dear Rodney, experiencing a surge in business since his work was featured in LA Magazine, has his eyes on a new potential client, a hunky black action-movie star named Felix Jones (James Black). Felix needs someone to redecorate his home, and Rodney falls instantly in lust with the project and him. The only problem is it seems Felix is as straight as they come. But appearances have been known to deceive before, which turns out not to be all that good for Rodney.

Like I said at the beginning, in my opinion, The Starter Wife is off to a great start this season and then some. If you’re reading and you watched, what do you say? Is the series looking good or do you see room for improvement? Do share.

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