malibu tales; A lively new miniseries starring Debra Messing gives the inside scoop on Hollywood life, reports Joan Juliet Buck.(The Starter Wife )(Television program review)(Brief article)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

Debra Messing once cut out an article by Gigi Levangie Grazer about being the invisible partner of a red-carpet power broker. "I was so taken by the writing, how funny and insightful and honest it was," she says. "Little did I know." Gigi, a buff beauty with a recklessly subversive wit, married to the producer Brian Grazer, says Hollywood wives have to be "staff sergeant, majordomo, geisha, and cosmetic guinea pig." This month, in USA Network's six-hour miniseries of Gigi Levangie Grazer's satiric novel The Starter Wife, Messing plays Molly, the heroine, a Hollywood wife whose access to all things good is brutally denied once she is dumped by her studio-executive husband, Kenny.

Now, adrift and 41, she is protected by her best friends: Alcoholic Joan (Judy Davis, sublimely acid) insists Molly move into her grand Malibu Colony house while she pretends to be in France but is actually in rehab. Fragile Cricket (Miranda Otto) can't always come through because her director ...