Silver Lake has seen better days

The new UPN nighttime soap “Sex, Love & Secrets” opens in Silver Lake, but then suddenly you’re being whisked back to the dawn of time. The screen goes all National Geographic as a narrator who sounds suspiciously like the narrator of “Desperate Housewives” is all “ ... yet unlike other animals, the forming of human groups spawns unique human behaviors ... “ and “one such behavior is the keeping of secrets.” It’s a tangent that ends on this puzzler: “Be it Santa Claus, Twinkies, infidelity or murder, all humans keep secrets.”

Oh, TV producer people, why must you involve Santa Claus in your sick, twisted games? Cut to a nightclub in Silver Lake. Silver Lake, in the universe of “Sex, Love & Secrets,” is at the intersection of “Melrose Place” and “Reality Bites,” catty-cornered to “Some Kind of Wonderful.” Charlie the hairdresser sex dog (Eric Balfour) is about to go off with Gabrielle, who unbeknown to him is Coop’s new girl, Coop (Omar Benson Miller) being the drummer in Hank’s band, Hank (James Stevenson) being Rose’s special dude, although Rose (Lauren German) can’t get past her ex Billy, who’s apparently dead, although Jolene (Denise Richards) has her doubts, Billy being Billy, and meanwhile Nina, poor Miss Nina (Tamara Taylor), she’ll never get Charlie to look her way, no matter how “what was that all about?” “Game Night” (board games, mind games) gets.

Created by Michael Gans and Richard Register, “Sex, Love & Secrets” wants to be a guilty pleasure for the Trader Joe’s-burrito-for-dinner American Apparel crowd. OK, but I wanted less Silver Lake as Fox soap and more Circus of Books. I wanted to smell the BO of the Beck wannabe, I wanted to covet thy gay neighbor’s house. Sadly, this show makes a mess of its neighborhood-centric premise.

Because the camera tells you so in quick establishing montage, the supposed nerve center on “Sex, Love & Secrets” (you want it to be sex and lies, I know) is Sunset Junction and surrounding Silver Lake hangs. But the series doesn’t really care about the place it’s set in (see “Entourage”), nor does its gimmickry make any kind of sense; the voice-over lady conveys not existential bigness but Realtor.

The characters are ensconced in TV-style referred-to careers -- the celebrity journalist (German), the publicist (Richards) -- and lifestyles that need a follow-up question. The ob-gyn resident, for instance, can afford the Silver Lake traditional? Maybe the voice-over lady can talk less about the group dynamic of the human species and clarify point of purchase.

None of these people, strangely, has a dog. Isn’t Silver Lake the twentysomething dog owner capital of the world? Perhaps that’s for next season’s drama-like-this-one, set in Venice, called “Abbot Kinney.”

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‘Sex, Love & Secrets’

Where: UPN

When: 9 to 10 tonight

Ratings: TV-14-DLS (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and sex)

Denise Richards...Jolene

Eric Balfour...Charlie

Lauren German...Rose

Omar Benson Miller...Coop

Tamara Taylor...Nina

James Stevenson...Hank

Lucas Bryant...Milo

Executive producers Jonathan Axelrod, Kelly Edwards and Daniel Cerone.