TV Reviews : ‘2000 Malibu Road’ Crashes on Credibility

Take a swanky beach house. Pack it with three swell-looking dolls and a man-hating madwoman. Surround them with sand and some real hunks. And hey, you’ve got something pretty darned dumb.

The late-summer drama “2000 Malibu Road” premieres in two-hour form at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS (Channels 2 and 8), thereafter airing as an hour at 9 p.m. Wednesdays.

Through a series of script conveniences, criminal attorney Perry Quinn (Jennifer Beals), jobless actress Lindsay Rule (Drew Barrymore) and Lindsay’s scheming, possessive, mentally unstable, utterly creepy sister-manager, Joy (Tuesday Knight), wind up sharing a posh Malibu house with former prostitute Jade O’Keefe (Lisa Hartman).

The amazing coincidences continue.

At a beach cafe, Perry runs into a handsome former high school friend who needs a lawyer. He hires her.

On the beach, Lindsay meets a handsome young writer whose parents are filmmakers. They hire her.

Meanwhile, the gratingly smarmy Joy creates havoc for the other characters, and someone is framing Jade for murder as irrationality looms at almost every twist in the script by series creator Terry Louise Fisher.

For starters, Joy is so obviously wacky and insincere that her ability to escape detection is simply a laugh. Jade’s arrest for murder--without even being questioned--is almost as implausible, as is the firing of a top network executive after he’s accused of casting “his own bimbo” in a sitcom. And just how the unemployed Lindsay is able to afford renting even a room in this zillion-dollar house is unclear.

What little credibility “2000 Malibu” has is owed to the capable work of Beals and Hartman. Otherwise, pray for a tidal wave.