'Dirty Sexy' pursues a new brand of soap

WRITING a glitzy, prime-time soap opera isn't as easy as it looks. For starters, it's hard to invent characters who can top the shenanigans committed in any given week by certain pop stars or heiresses to hotel fortunes. And then there's the sympathy factor: How do you make viewers really feel for -- as opposed to simply repelled or tickled by -- the idle, self-absorbed rich?

"People can't just watch the opulence and wealth," said writer-producer Greg Berlanti, who's confronting the problem head-on in his new nighttime soap starring Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause, "Dirty Sexy Money," premiering Wednesday on ABC. "It can't succeed on its cheesiness."

No, cheesiness is not enough: Perhaps that should be the mantra for this new fall season, which officially starts today and will bring rollouts for other soapy series that promise to cast an odor not unlike Limburger, among them CBS' "Cane" and ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff, "Private Practice." ("Gossip Girl," the CW's sudsy newcomer about the prep-school elite, did not gather a very big audience last week, although the network said it scored well with its core young-female viewers.)

The producers behind "Dirty Sexy Money" know they have to be different than what else is out there. That's why they're trying to mix the fun, bubbly stuff with more earnest drama. One major plot strand involves dissipated politico Patrick Darling (William Baldwin) and his transgender girlfriend, Carmelita (Candis Cayne) -- and the affair isn't played just for cheap, smirking laughs, although there are some of those. (Of course, earnestness goes only so far: One of the series regulars gets married and then divorced during the seventh episode.) Production took a brief hiatus this month, but Berlanti and creator-executive producer Craig Wright said the pause was merely meant to give them time to tweak the second episode and didn't indicate larger problems with the series.

"We talk a lot about doing 'Dynasty' or 'Dallas' in a brand-new way," Wright said at his office on the Paramount lot.

But can Sutherland's morally obscure mogul Tripp Darling become a billionaire Americans love to hate, à la J.R. Ewing or Blake Carrington?

On one hand, the timing of "Dirty Sexy Money" wouldn't seem to be propitious, with the housing market cratering, recession fears gripping Wall Street and economists noting a yawning gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Forbes revealed last week that for the first time, its annual list of the 400 richest Americans included no one who isn't a billionaire -- in fact, 82 billionaires were too cash-starved to make the cut.