‘Dangerous Women’ Arrives on KCOP Armed With Cliches

“Dangerous Women,” an hourlong, twice-weekly serialized melodrama, debuts tonight (KCOP Channel 13 at 8). The show is amateur night all the way, a classic potboiler.

If this embarrassment were on network television, heads would probably roll. As it is, the production (with the week’s second episodes airing on Wednesdays) tarnishes whatever cachet first-run syndication has come to have.

The premiere story sets in motion the lives of six women, whom we meet in prison. Usually movie-makers put women in cellblocks because some think it’s sexy, and certainly the genre is ripe for satire. But no such luck here.

Rather than being dangerous, these women are all victims of Life (mostly venal husbands). One by one, as future episodes establish, they’re released from prison to face their demons and come ultimately to give one another hugs and support on the outside.

Reg Watson’s script and Joseph Behar’s direction are so pedestrian it’s a testament to the actresses that they survive this drivel. In tonight’s yawner, Valerie Wildman, playing a wife whose face has been sliced up with a razor, manages to outwit her mobster husband. And we haven’t even started in on the blonde nanny who’s raped in a house that looks like Tara.

If the creators were playing this as a parody, they’d have a hit. There’s nothing wrong with applying the structure of the soaps to prime-time TV. It’s been done for years.

But the cynicism here is transparent.