TV REVIEW : Take Your Chances With ‘Lucky’

“Ummh! I love asparagus! It’s so sexual, don’t you agree, Dimitri?”

He is a character in the ever-prodigious dramaturgy of Jackie Collins, so Dimitri dutifully agrees. And so will anyone else who has made it to the final lurid hour of the miniseries “Jackie Collins’ ‘Lucky / Chances,’ ” where positively everything is so sexual--fruits and vegetables included, but especially power, money and a raging sub-mediocrity that infects all these characters’ lives and lines of dialogue. (It airs across three consecutive nights, beginning Sunday at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39.)

If you’re certain that Las Vegas is the sexiest place on Earth, but have never actually been there, this is probably the six hours for you. But before it shifts there, the action begins in 1933 New York, where young Gino Santangelo is running booze when a sleazy senator’s wife picks him as a pupil in lovemaking, setting him on his course to riches. Though his morals seem mightily indiscriminate, we immediately know Gino is the hero because the one thing he won’t do is--you guessed it--run drugs.

That’s a cliche that dates back before “The Godfather,” as do most of Collins’ cliches, but it’s especially emblematic. In her world, heroism is defined as being ever so slightly more temperate in your ruthlessness and ambition than the other powermongers. Asceticism is strictly for extras.

Though the miniseries’ second protagonist, Gino’s gorgeous daughter, Lucky, seems to be set up as a greedy, conniving, ungrateful little snot out to wrest control of Daddy’s casino, we soon see that her slight reluctance to do absolutely anything to get ahead is also the stuff of which heroine-ism is made. If you can bring yourself to genuinely care about these people, you’ve probably already sent donations to Donald Trump.

As Gino, Vincent Irizarry is half Tom Cruise’s empty smile and half Vincent Spano’s meathead swagger. As he ages into the ‘60s and ‘70s, he looks like a high-school senior with gray frosting and fake mustache decked out for a production of “Our Town,” like much of the rest of the cast.

As Lucky, who is lucky enough not to age, Sheena Easton look-alike Nicollette Sheridan--a veritable Cosmo cover brought to life--will wear no dress that isn’t front-ventilated, and sports itsy-bitsy bikinis as well, perhaps in self-homage to her earlier title role in the movie “The Sure Thing.”