‘Dirty Sexy’ pursues a new brand of soap

WRITING a glitzy, prime-time soap opera isn’t as easy as it looks. For starters, it’s hard to invent characters who can top the shenanigans committed in any given week by certain pop stars or heiresses to hotel fortunes. And then there’s the sympathy factor: How do you make viewers really feel for -- as opposed to simply repelled or tickled by -- the idle, self-absorbed rich?

“People can’t just watch the opulence and wealth,” said writer-producer Greg Berlanti, who’s confronting the problem head-on in his new nighttime soap starring Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause, “Dirty Sexy Money,” premiering Wednesday on ABC. “It can’t succeed on its cheesiness.”

No, cheesiness is not enough: Perhaps that should be the mantra for this new fall season, which officially starts today and will bring rollouts for other soapy series that promise to cast an odor not unlike Limburger, among them CBS’ “Cane” and ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff, “Private Practice.” (“Gossip Girl,” the CW’s sudsy newcomer about the prep-school elite, did not gather a very big audience last week, although the network said it scored well with its core young-female viewers.)

The producers behind “Dirty Sexy Money” know they have to be different than what else is out there. That’s why they’re trying to mix the fun, bubbly stuff with more earnest drama. One major plot strand involves dissipated politico Patrick Darling (William Baldwin) and his transgender girlfriend, Carmelita (Candis Cayne) -- and the affair isn’t played just for cheap, smirking laughs, although there are some of those. (Of course, earnestness goes only so far: One of the series regulars gets married and then divorced during the seventh episode.) Production took a brief hiatus this month, but Berlanti and creator-executive producer Craig Wright said the pause was merely meant to give them time to tweak the second episode and didn’t indicate larger problems with the series.

“We talk a lot about doing ‘Dynasty’ or ‘Dallas’ in a brand-new way,” Wright said at his office on the Paramount lot.

But can Sutherland’s morally obscure mogul Tripp Darling become a billionaire Americans love to hate, Ã la J.R. Ewing or Blake Carrington?

On one hand, the timing of “Dirty Sexy Money” wouldn’t seem to be propitious, with the housing market cratering, recession fears gripping Wall Street and economists noting a yawning gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Forbes revealed last week that for the first time, its annual list of the 400 richest Americans included no one who isn’t a billionaire -- in fact, 82 billionaires were too cash-starved to make the cut.

Then again, hard times seem to only heighten Americans’ obsession with them that got. Recall that “Dallas” premiered in 1978, smack in the middle of Carter-administration economic malaise -- though the counter-argument could be made that the series helped pave the way for the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan era.

In any case, a bigger problem for ABC is that, while “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy” may have made it look easy, the nighttime soap is in fact an exceptionally tricky format.

In 2000, NBC made a big push to revive the genre with Aaron Spelling’s dependably trashy “Titans”; it lasted all of 11 episodes. Fox’s “The O.C.” initially looked like a hit, but many fans tired of its violent twists and cliffhanger plot dynamics (the third-season finale killed off Marissa, the Mischa Barton lead character with the operatic personal life) and it limped to an end after four seasons.

Steve McPherson, the ABC Entertainment chief who put “Dirty Sexy Money” on the schedule, said shows like “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest” remained the models for the newer outings among the filthy rich.

“The challenge is to capture that guilty-pleasure quality but to do it in a contemporary way,” McPherson said.

The producers of “Dirty Sexy Money” believe they have the perfect device in Nick George (Krause), a master of the slow burn who serves as the Darling family’s attorney and all-purpose fixer. Meanwhile, he’s trying to solve the mystery behind the death of his father, who served a similar role for the Darlings.

“It gives us the ironic comedy we want,” Wright said of Nick’s part, “because we’re seeing it through a person who doesn’t share their values and doesn’t have the advantages they have.”

No new show is a sure thing -- indeed, the vast majority of shows on any network slate is doomed to cancellation within a year or less -- but “Dirty Sexy Money” may have earned a bit more network confidence than most. Berlanti and Wright spent last season working on ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters,” the soap with Sally Field as the matriarch of a Los Angeles clan.

Previously best-known for his work on the WB Network’s cult favorite “Everwood,” Berlanti joined “Brothers & Sisters” just weeks before its September 2006 debut, after the abrupt departure of executive producer Marti Noxon. Soon he was credited for pulling off a near-miraculous creative salvage job that transformed a floundering show into a modest hit.

By that time, Berlanti and Wright were already at work developing what would become “Dirty Sexy Money.” Wright is credited as the creator, and it’s evident that he borrowed a bit from his own colorful life as inspiration for the series.

Wright left home at 14 after his mother’s death, he said, and spent much of his youth hitchhiking through the Midwest. Frustrated with early problems as a playwright, he wound up training for the ministry at the “very, very liberal” United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in New Brighton, Minn. (In “Dirty Sexy Money,” one of Tripp’s sons, Brian, is an Episcopal minister who’s fathered an illegitimate son.) “I’d say half the student body is gay and lesbian,” he said.

He was working as an assistant minister in St. Paul, writing plays on the side, when he got a call that led to a writing job on HBO’s hit drama “Six Feet Under.”

Even after years in the business, Wright still carries himself more like a playwright, or maybe a particularly literate clergyman, than a TV scribe. He peppered a conversation that included myself, Berlanti and executive producer Josh Reims with wide-ranging cultural references from Dickens to the rock band Nirvana. When I stopped to admire an arresting painting of a lamb that dominates his office, Wright mused that the artwork symbolizes “the facticity of life.”

At another point, he explained his approach to “Dirty Sexy Money” with a quote from the Italian writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini: “What I advocate is precisely what the bourgeoisie advocate, only I advocate it with the desperation that modifies it and renders it humane.”

At this, Berlanti paused for a beat, looked at me and then said: “We work well together because I have no clue what he just said.”

But no one necessarily has to understand Wright’s allusions, as long as viewers care about the hyper-rich folk he’s created.

Will they? Well, who knows? This is a soap, for heaven’s sake. Churning out this stuff is not as easy as it looks, remember? In the end, it may all boil down to whether Americans sweating out credit crunches and housing busts are ready for escapism -- escapism in the form of conniving (and possibly misunderstood?) billionaires and those who serve them.

“We have the wealth and the opulence that those shows in the ‘80s had,” Berlanti said. “But hopefully, we show the other side of it too. We show the underbelly of it, and the costs of those kinds of things.”

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The Channel Island column runs every Monday in Calendar. Contact Scott Collins at scott.collins@latimes.com