I am – Hercules!!
"The Starter Wife" is a six-hour miniseries about a movie producer's ex-wife (Debra Messing) who tries to love again. It’s based on the popular 2005 novel by Gigi Levangie Glazer, herself now the ex-wife of a movie producer. USA is making a marketing push, but what say the critics? Variety says:

… as stitched together into a six-hour USA miniseries, the whole exercise feels like a nonstarter. The two-hour premiere (to be followed by four weekly installments) is neither trashy enough to qualify as a Jackie Collins-type guilty pleasure nor hip enough to break ground sifting through Hollywood's dirty, overpriced lingerie …

The Hollywood Reporter says:

… "Wife" is entertaining and bitingly irreverent, at once sweet and sour. It ropes you in because Messing is so adept at making us like her neurotic personage. If there is an abiding problem with the mini (and this isn't insignificant), it's that it actually is based on something of a flawed premise. It isn't a riches-to-rags story so much as a riches-to-riches. …

The Los Angeles Times says:

… Cast within an inch of its life and full of terrific Hollywood tear-downs, "The Starter Wife" tries to be good clean mean-spirited fun. For the most part it succeeds, but the chick-lit trend of really sticking it to rich women remains disturbing in its sexism and classism. … the character, narcissistic and grasping, gives us little to love. …

The Chicago Tribune says:

… an enjoyable chick-lit concoction … As adapted by USA, it’s the TV equivalent to a satisfying, entirely inconsequential beach read. …

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says:

… The essence of chick lit is well covered here -- fabulous woman and friends get toppled by circumstance, tumble down the hill together and land on the solid ground of True Selfhood. The formula for a decent, quick read. Television requires a different mix of stimulants absent in USA's muddled version. A sense of destination, solid plot progression and firmly developed story lines would all be nice. Director Jon Avnet ("Fried Green Tomatoes") should know that by now. …

The Boston Herald says:

… Messing is not talented enough to carry off the role of Hollywood wife Molly Kagan … could be the love child of “Sex and the City” and “Will & Grace,” but the satire is so broad, it loses its edge.

USA Today says:

… The Starter Wife is really little more than a summer read brought to somewhat overstuffed life. Still, if it's fluff, it's well-made, well-cast fluff that marks an entertaining union of two oft-dismissed genres: chick lit and TV movies. Maybe they were always meant to wed and we just never noticed. …

9 p.m. Thursday. USA.

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