Lackluster script spoils ‘Movie Stars’> WB sitcom ultimately hackneyed

“Movie Stars,” which debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on The WB, is appropriately high-concept: celebrity actors crammed into “Father Knows Best.” Too bad the producers forgot that the script is equally as important as the initial idea.

Reese Hardin (played by Harry Hamlin, “L.A. Law”) and Jacey Wyatt (Jennifer Grant, the daughter of Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon) are Hollywood’s dream couple. He’s the action star; she’s the act-tor (think Bruce Willis and a Demi Moore that could act). “You’re the one who gets nominated for Academy Awards; my movies have only made 3 billion dollars. I guess I’ll have to live with that,” Hardin explains.

The couple lives in Malibu with their young children, 13-year-old, would-be power player Apache (Zack Hopkins) and levelheaded 6-year-old Moonglow (Rachel David). Adding chaos to the household is the arrival of Hardin’s sexpot teen daughter, Lori (Marnette Patterson), who has decided, with her mother’s blessing, to leave Ohio and move to Malibu.

Now the show-biz asides in “Movie Stars” are genuinely funny. Lori describes Malibu thusly: “The most dangerous thing that can happen here is Robert Downey Jr. looking for a place to crash.” A great running gag is when Reece’s brother Todd, a Juilliard-trained actor whose biggest role in Hollywood is Asteroid Victim 702 in “Armageddon,” gets together for poker with other famous siblings Joey Travolta, Don Swayze and Frank Stallone, who play themselves and viciously riff on the underside of fame. Todd (played by Mark Benninghofen) is hilarious when he’s delivering a monologue from an Ibsen play while dressed as Tweetie Bird at a birthday party for one of Mel Gibson’s kids.

Where the wheels fall off of “Movie Stars,” a potential midseason replacement, is that once the Hollywood trappings are stripped away, what’s left is a hackneyed family sitcom. In the pilot, Lori, who feels unwanted, runs away before learning the message that “we’re all family.” In the second show, Apache defends the half-sister he’s always sparring with against the advances of their private school’s leading lothario. It’s not like those plots haven’t been used since the ’50s.

“Movie Stars” is the best of the WB’s sitcom efforts, but that’s truly damning with faint praise. Created by Wayne Lemon (of the maddeningly uneven “Grace Under Fire”), the show must give its talented cast stronger material by better mining its setting, so that they could develop into a crack comic ensemble. Otherwise, “Movie Stars” won’t draw at the box office.