Acting out? Not, alas, on ‘The Starlet’

“And remember,” a voice-over assured eight young women who would soon break into groups of two, change into bikinis, climb into a hot tub and, when a director yelled “Action!,” try to master the art of the lesbian kiss, “Angelina Jolie, Hilary Swank and Charlize Theron have all played roles where they’ve had to kiss other women.”

Well, it’s true. I believe the Swank movie to which the voice-over was alluding is “Boys Don’t Cry,” although I don’t remember a hot tub in that film. The scene these contestants would be doing on WB’s reality show “The Starlet” was more a homage to soft-core porn than Oscar glory. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

In the case of the contestants on “The Starlet,” it starts by submitting to a reality show in which mastering the craft of acting is the ostensible goal, when really the show plays like a Disney Channel version of Hollywood dress-up. It’s a series that only hints at a dark night of the soul for our young contestants, one of whom tonight will be crowned “The Starlet,” a title that carries with it a “career-launching role” on the WB series “One Tree Hill” and a few vague talent deals.

Though it would seem to be cut squarely in the mold of two current hits, Fox’s “American Idol” (rampantly commercialized karaoke contest/high school talent show perhaps best appreciated flying on massive amounts of Red Bull) and UPN’s “America’s Next Top Model” (where last week I learned the meaning of the term “1970s cheek”), America isn’t so much watching “The Starlet.”

Why not? I’m not suggesting you ponder this. I’m only saying the show seemed to have the elements of a cheesy hit. But if insta-fame is what “Idol” and “Top Model” promise while delivering dollops of cringe-inducing humiliation, “The Starlet” suggests that achieving fame as an actor is a longer, more laborious process, involving acting gurus (“Lose your mind, because if you lose your mind you’ll come to your senses”) and, for the contestant pronounced “best in class” on one episode, dinner with the director of “The Animal.”

But there are two kinds of acting in “The Starlet,” one of which the show never talks about. That would be the kind of acting that calls for you to play a version of yourself on a reality show. On “The Starlet,” this is where the contestants, no doubt steeped in the contrivances of the genre, excel, and where they get the bulk of their screen time.

The rest feels like so much window dressing. We have seen them whittled from 10 to the final three, the young women put through an acting class and a screen test each week, whereupon their performances are judged by a panel of experts: actress Vivica A. Fox, casting director Joseph Middleton and actress Faye Dunaway, who gets to utter the show’s signature line of rejection: “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

In the age of “Idol,” that line may be more accurately put, “Don’t text us; we’ll text you,” but Dunaway is on hand to lend the show its veneer of Hollywood grace and past glory. And yet the star of “Network,” “Chinatown” and “Bonnie and Clyde” has, surprisingly, failed to pop in her first role as a reality show celebrity legend. In her various performances of the “Don’t call us; we’ll call you” moment, Dunaway gives the line “bones,” as she is frequently exhorting the would-be starlets to do in their own screen tests, but she’s not nearly as coldblooded as she was playing a TV executive in “Network”; the harshest thing I’ve heard her say to a contestant comes tonight, when Dunaway scolds 23-year-old Katie for saying she had “fun” doing a crying scene in a church confessional.

“How could you say you had so much fun?” Dunaway snaps. “If we wanted fake emotion, we’d cast Barbie.”

“The Starlet” is supposed to toughen up its would-be actresses in the way that “America’s Next Top Model” works over the egos of its wannabe models, but it doesn’t come close. Last week on “Top Model,” celebrity judge Janice Dickinson was pitiless when addressing a contestant whose face had broken out in horrifying blotches due to a bacterial infection, while another judge said to one of the contestants, “I think your face is dead.”

In the end, for something about Hollywood, “The Starlet” lacks a hook. “Top Model” is a better approximation of how cruelly appraising the modeling business can be than “The Starlet” is of the acting field. In the green rooms of “The Starlet,” the contestants cry but don’t smoke -- just one small example of the show’s lack of showbiz verisimilitude. It’s more interested in trading on old Schwab’s Pharmacy cliches of Hollywood.

Having been raised on reality TV, newbies arrive knowing how to behave in front of the cameras, if not how to act, in the truly professional sense. Which is what they’re supposed to be learning on “The Starlet.” The show gives them scenes, usually from WB shows or shows owned by parent studio Warner Bros., to perform -- “Smallville,” “One Tree Hill” and “Fastlane,” the inspiration for the hot tub scene, originally performed by thespians Tiffani Thiessen and Jaime Pressly.

Last week had the final four contestants performing a staged reading of a scene from “Friends.”

“This scene, originally played by Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow,” host Katie Wagner told the women, sounding as though she were talking about the original Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “takes place after Rachel and Phoebe find out that Chandler and Monica are getting married.”

The would-be starlets could not measure up as “Friends.” Even bad singing still qualifies as karaoke; bad acting is just bad acting.

Tonight, we’re down to three finalists: Michelynne, the fresh-faced 18-year-old Minnesotan who doesn’t want to go back to that scary Hollywood youth hostel she’d been staying in; Mercedes, 24, the regal beauty with body-image issues; and Katie, 23, perky and auburn-haired, who at times you suspect has been kept around only to play the “All About Eve” character.

“The Starlet” looks like it will be a one-and-out show -- the WB is noncommittal about doing it again. Unlike “Idol” and “Top Model,” “The Starlet” lacks playfulness that can make what is essentially a bottom-feeding genre eminently watchable.