Shouldn’t an ‘Au Pair’ With an MBA Be Smarter Than This?

You’re a young, attractive female MBA grad--top of your class--so desperate for work that you apply for a photocopying job at a mega-corporation.

Because you’re a smart MBA grad, you don’t ask for explanations when the handsome CEO himself interviews you, offers you $700 a week, and then the very next day has you picked up by his personal limo and flown first-class to a luxury hotel in Paris.

The huge, glam hotel suite does make you wonder, though. Are copy machines really in your future? Nope. It turns out that you’ve been hired as . . . an au pair.

What’s a smart MBA grad to do? Object to taking care of the CEO’s two bratty kids? Utter a peep about your misunderstanding? Mais non.

So begins Sunday’s Fox Family Channel “romantic comedy,” “Au Pair.” Can it get any dopier? It’s a challenge, but writers Jeffrey C. Sherman and Cheryl Saban, director Mark Griffiths and the cast--led by a game Gregory Harrison as busy but romantic Oliver the CEO, and Heidi Noelle Lenhart as coy MBA Cinderella Jenny--rise to it.

Widower Oliver has a corporate exec girlfriend (Jane Sibbett) who steals Jenny’s stunningly astute ideas for improving the company, connives to send her packing and in the process turns into a raging Cruella De Vil-type caricature.

Oliver’s son and daughter misbehave because they want Dad’s attention, but believing that these amazingly unpleasant tykes are vulnerable is too big a stretch.

No one involved apparently saw anything questionable in making prepubescent Alex (Jake Dinwiddie) sex-obsessed--he leeringly spies on Jenny via hidden camera when she’s undressing, and later Jenny and Kate (Katie Volding) smilingly listen to what sounds like Alex engaged in sexplay with an older girl. Oops, the joke’s on us--they’re just playing Game Boy.

It’s OK, too, for the kids to spend oodles of unknowing Dad’s money to give Jenny a sexy make-over, including contact lenses, many outfits and a new hairstyle. The shopping and modeling montage is done, oo-la-la, to the tune of “Pretty Woman.”

How else will a smart MBA grad impress a rich and powerful CEO with his own private plane and a castle in Vienna? It’s almost bad enough to be good.

* “Au Pair” on Fox Family Channel on Sunday at 8 p.m. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).