Jonathan Storm | Crazy, evil, half-naked teens amid the Palms, moms, dads

The inherent duality of the dramatic experience is inelegantly exemplified by

Hidden Palms

, and if you are enjoying this convoluted assessment, you should especially appreciate the show, where teenagers talk about their lives like overeager psych students.

They also wear skimpy clothes, but it's OK to look, since a lot of the actors had previous exposure on The O.C. and are now about 30, and, besides, it's the CW network, where the lingerie-loving Pussycat Dolls are considered role models for the mothers and CEOs of tomorrow.

Hidden Palms, premiering tonight at 8, comes from Kevin Williamson, who made a bundle with blabby, introspective teens on Dawson's Creek, and helped Katie Holmes with her baby steps into the gossip ionosphere.

Even Williamson became impatient with Creek's oppressive soapiness, so he moved on to Scream, a horror movie that was way more fun and exciting, and still presented lots of supposed teens in plenty of skimpy clothes, if that's not an oxymoron. (This, by the way, is exactly the type of philosophical question that Williamson's teens might ponder, if they ever thought of anything other than themselves.)

The big mysteries behind the trees in Hidden Palms are also way more fun than the mud in the murky waters of Dawson's Creek. That's not a lot, but pondering the extent of evil in the bad boy, and the cause of the craziness in the gorgeous girl, not to mention why the dead kid died, is considerably more stimulating than it was years ago to put the TV on mute and gawk when Katie Holmes came on the screen.

Plus, Sharon Lawrence and Gail O'Grady, who, respectively, played Sipowicz's prosecutor wife and the comely squad secretary Miss Abandando on NYPD Blue, are reunited as neighboring moms with distinctly different personalities in the Palm Springs cul de sac, or gated enclave, or whatever it is, where all the too-rich families in the show hang their hats when they aren't all partying at the country club.

Hidden Palms' most intriguing character, Liza Witter, who actually is played by a teenager (17-year-old Ellary Porterfield), first appears in a hazmat suit, doing chemistry experiments in the garage, which she almost blows to smithereens, along with herself and the rest of the house.

"Too much nitrate," she explains to her dad, whose furious reaction threatens to bring down what his daughter has left standing.

Later, we see her doing a different kind of chemistry in her secret lair, fiddling with cosmetics, trying to tart up her beautiful self and suffering extreme makeup mortification when someone catches her in the act.

Why? And why? We ask, if we're watching, and then maybe we'll stick around to find out.

Less intriguing, unless you're a 12-to-24-year-old female, is the predicament of the central character, Johnny Miller (The O.C.'s Taylor Handley). That means it will be more intriguing to almost everybody who is watching.

Having experienced a shocking trauma, descended immediately into chronic alcoholism, and come out clean but still battling the bottle on the other side - all in the space of one year - 16-year-old Johnny has moved to Palm Springs with his mother, the former Miss Abandando, and her brand-new husband, Bob, who's played by the perennially clean-cut D.W. Moffett.

There's something fishy about Bob, which means he fits right in. And there's something fishy about Hidden Palms, which the network announced last May and is just getting onto the schedule now.

But summer's coming, and the half-naked folks in Hidden Palms look way better than the ones perambulating Wildwood's elevated, cellulose-fabricated footpath. Besides, don't you want to see what the bad kid does for an encore, after tossing a severed hand through the hero's window?

Television Review

Hidden Palms

Debuts tonight at 8 on the CW57.