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I suppose I should admit it right up front and get it out of the way: It appears that I might have a thing for Debra Messing.

There's no other way to explain my surprising enthusiasm for the lightweight, chick-flick puffball in which she stars called The Starter Wife, which premieres at 9 p.m. tomorrow on cable's USA Network. The limited-run series will start with a two-hour segment this week, followed by one-hour episodes for the next four weeks.

I never watched Messing during her years on Will & Grace, but from what I hear, she was the weakest of the actors in the hit sitcom. (Eric McCormack and Sean Hayes reportedly did most of the heavy comedic lifting on that show.) But in The Starter Wife, she's in just about every scene, and she manages to make what should be a thoroughly unlikable character into a doll.

The miniseries, based on a best-selling 2005 novel by Gigi Levangie Grazer, tells the story of the 40-something wife of a powerful Hollywood studio chief who is forced to cobble together a new life after being unceremoniously dumped by her husband when he starts messing around with a much younger, Britney Spears-like pop singer.

As Molly Kagan, Messing plays the pampered wife, who spends most of her time lunching, planning charity functions, and doing Pilates with her equally shallow, superficial, and catty gal pals. Her self-absorbed pig of a husband, Kenny, played with finely honed obnoxiousness by Peter Jacobson (As Good As It Gets), has little time for Molly, and neither of them has much time for their 5-year-old daughter, Jaden, who knows her nanny better than she knows her own parents.

ON THE AIR

• ‘The Starter Wife’ makes its debut at 9 p.m. tomorrow on Buckeye CableSystem Channel 4.

When Kenny announces - by cell phone - that he wants a divorce, Molly is dumbfounded. Not because she thinks that she and her husband share anything special, but because she's spent the last decade of her life being the good little Hollywood wife and she no longer has any idea how to do anything else.

It doesn't take long for her to realize that without a rich, well-connected husband, she has all but ceased to exist. Her gym membership vanishes, maitre d's ignore her, and some of her so-called friends treat her like she's got cooties when she shows up at their parties.

Naturally, Molly is soon feeling sorry for herself, but it's hard for anyone else to. As she rolls up to a posh gated community in her Lincoln Navigator to stay at the Malibu beach house of a friend who's in rehab, the security guard at the gate is less than sympathetic.

"I don't want your pity," Molly informs her.

"That works for me," replies the young guard caustically, "since I've got $50,000 in student loans, and my grandma and I might be evicted because of her dog."

Along the way to redefining herself, Molly manages to find a little romance - a mysterious beach bum who's more creepy than cute - but more important, she also discovers a steely determination and a sense of worth that she didn't realize she still had.

The details from Grazer's book - the pettiness, backstabbing, and philandering - are probably pretty accurate, inasmuch as the author has seen such things up close for years, as the wife of a real-life big-time Hollywood producer, Brian Grazer.

Without Messing in the lead role, it would be all but impossible to feel sympathy, empathy, or much of anything else for the jilted wife. After all, she still has more than most women will ever have in their lifetimes, and if she's not able to pull herself up by her cute little Jimmy Choo bootstraps, well, so what?

But thanks to Messing's charm and solid comic instincts, her unsinkable Molly becomes somebody viewers can laugh with, and ultimately root for. What's more, she might even be able to make this bit of summer fluff worth watching for the next few weeks.

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