‘Savannah’: Treasuring the Trash

You admire the tenacity. Aaron Spelling’s new series, “Savannah,” proves that he hasn’t given up his ambition to be the Ed Wood Jr. of television.

Wood, the eager B-movie meister of the 1950s who was lovingly reprised in the movie “Ed Wood,” was said to be so inept that his hapless pictures (the likes of “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” “Glen or Glenda,” “The Sinister Urge” and “Bride of the Monster”) could not be encountered without laughing.

Spelling’s many conventional successes plus his occasional higher-brow detours (such as the old ABC series “Family” and HBO’s “And the Band Played On”) attest that the prolific producer has never dipped as low as the klutzy Wood, of course. But from his 1985 ABC miniseries “Hollywood Wives” to the WB network’s “Savannah” on Sunday, he keeps trying.

This is no rap.

His Charlie’s Peaches of “Savannah” are more rewarding than the vast majority of prime-time’s stiffs, including the sweep of hoity-toity dramas that tank up on better talent and scripts in pursuit of snooty respectability. Such phonies.

The double-sized premiere of “Savannah” is comfortable being what it is: two deliciously absurd hours of hunks and hooters that strive mightily for rouged-up, purple-lidded burlesque, and get there.

At its heart are three breathtaking belles named Lane, Peyton and Reese and, notes a publicity blurb, “the men who love them.”

A bigger laugh from drama you couldn’t hope for. The bad Southern accents alone earn a trash lover’s respect, which is why “Savannah” deserves a level of attention that a show on the near-anonymous WB network usually wouldn’t get.

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In the 1986 book “Off Camera: Conversations With the Makers of Prime-Time Television,” Spelling decried his critics and told writers Richard Levinson and William Link that he disliked seeing his work “compared to a series that may really be doing something special.” He added: “What I do want to be compared with are other series in the same genre I’m doing.”

Give him credit. Spelling has proved himself master of the higher trash (“Dynasty”), the middle trash (“Beverly Hills, 90210”) and “Melrose Place”) and the lower trash. On the latter rung, who in TV but Spelling could have fashioned something as endearingly loopy, for example, as “Finder of Lost Loves,” a mid-1980s blip on ABC whose hero tracked down old flames for his clients? Or Fox’s gorgeously nutty “Models Inc.,” last season’s “Melrose Place” spinoff about cavorting beauties in Malibu? Such heaving breasts, such panoramic thighs. And these were just the guys.

The failure of “Models Inc.” (available in reruns on cable’s E! Entertainment network) is no fault of Spelling but a grim comment on America’s atrophied appreciation of trash. Just what is going on here? Has the nation’s proletariat lost its way? Are we becoming a culture of gentrified snobs?

Even Spelling’s signature rubbish, “Charlie’s Angels,” would have difficulty today, given the icy greeting accorded “Central Park West,” last fall’s doomed but tasty CBS hour about the sexy sharks of magazine publishing and the hairdos and hormones that drive them. Although Spelling wasn’t involved, this gourmet nonsense was conjured up by Darren Star, creator of Spelling’s tinselled “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place,” making its downfall almost a family tragedy.

What does this bode for “Savannah,” also divinely awful and not for the meek of heart? And what level of a snit will House Speaker Newt Gingrich have when he learns how amoral Hollywood is maligning his fellow Georgians?

Check them out: After going their separate ways, childhood friends Reese Burton (Shannon Sturges), Lane McKenzie (Robyn Lively) and Peyton Richards (Jamie Luner) are converging in young babe-hood.

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Talk about your bride of the monster. Rich, pampered, virginal Reese is set to wed rotten playboy Travis Peterson (George Eads), but is too much of a cabbage to figure out the obvious, that he’s stepping out on her. The stepee in this case is none other than Reese’s two-faced confidante, Peyton, a coarse barmaid who has made her life’s work the destruction of Reese’s happiness.

Peyton lives at the Burton estate, where her virtuous but ineffectual mother, Lucille (Wendy Phillips), is the housekeeper.

After failing to land a job as a journalist in New York, meanwhile, the gleaming Lane is back in town having an intimate rapprochement with local cop Dean Collins (David Gail).

“Savannah” crafts the kind of delicate balance that good acting could ruin. Fortunately, that’s no problem, for rarely has a TV series housed so many vacant faces. For example, Travis, Officer Dean and another of the show’s poster boys, scam artist Tom Massick (Paul Satterfield), are strikingly reminiscent of the mummies favored by B-movie maker Wood. Soaring right off the clunker scale, in particular, are scenes with the wooden Massick, so obviously a smarmy fraud that a shrewd entrepreneur like Reese’s gadzillionaire father, Edward Burton (Ray Wise), would surely see through the phony deal he’s being sucked into. But, of course, he doesn’t.

Occasionally, “Savannah” teeters dangerously on the edge of credibility, only to regain its equilibrium. Arguably the premiere’s most adroitly decadent sequence finds Dean and Lane buzzing off to Atlanta for an overnight stay so that she can sort out a financial crisis there. Platonic to this point and wary of that sinister urge, they agree to book separate rooms.

Now, your higher trash would bypass this cliche and aim for subtler corn. This being “Savannah,” however, Dean and Lane learn from the desk clerk that the motel has only . . .

ONE ROOM!!!

Oy vey.

No trash can endure without a quality erotic vixen, and “Savannah” has a highly promising one in Luner’s Peyton. Her nasty stew is not yet equal to Joan Collins’ scheming Alexis in “Dynasty” or the frosty witch that Madchen Amick played in “Central Park West” or the back-stabbers whom Morgan Fairchild has made a career of playing. But as two-timing Travis will discover, Peyton is not to be crossed.

So there it is, a Spelling series observed in context with other series not doing something special, one plenty bad enough to impress trash gourmands and perhaps even the spirit of Ed Wood.

* “Savannah” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on WB (Channel 5). It will thereafter be seen in weekly installments on Sundays at 9 p.m., beginning Feb. 4.