TV REVIEWS : Lust and Misery on ‘Winnetka Road’

It’s the typical suburb.

You’ve got mostly young, gorgeous people, trying--is it too much to ask?--to find a little love and understanding. You’ve got the blurry forms of nude lovers glimpsed through the frosted glass of a shower door. You’ve got meaningful pauses and lingering looks. You’ve got a cop named Jack Passion (Josh Brolin) reuniting with his former sweetheart, movie actress Terry Mears (Paige Turco), who’s returned to upper-class Oak Bluff followed by her limo-riding, angry ex-boyfriend. You’ve got a handsome stud (Kurt Deutch) renting a garage apartment from a fetching local weirdo (Meg Tilly). You’ve got a square-looking guy (Ed Begley Jr.) who leaves his wife (Catherine Hicks) and two kids for another woman. You’ve got Hicks in her underwear and Eddie Bracken, best known as a comic actor from the ‘40s and ‘50s, as a blind priest.

In other words, Aaron Spelling’s “Winnetka Road” is amiable nonsense.

Written by executive producer John Byrum and directed by Peter Werner, the NBC series stalks a middle ground between two Spelling successes: ABC’s tumultuous, self-mocking “Dynasty” and Fox’s homogenous “Melrose Place.”

And just what kind of trouble is waiting in the wings? As one character says, “Personally . . . I think everything’s about to go as wrong as it can.”

The dramatic attraction is not yet magnetic and the humor is only so-so, but “Winnetka Road” is the kind of sanitized lust and misery you hate yourself for watching but watch anyway.

* “Winnetka Road” airs at 10 tonight on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39).