Jonathan Storm: Ugly beauty

Here's life in the fetid, unfun world of the wealthy on the desperate CW network:

"In eighth grade, my dad had an affair. I had to tell someone, so I told my best friend, Naomi. She promised me that she wouldn't tell anyone, but she told everyone."

Now, Naomi's dad is having an affair (most of them do in this milieu, where loyalty is laughed at, and almost everyone is almost always sexually aroused), and the girl with the eighth-grade grudge thinks about trumpeting her former friend's embarrassment on her must-read high school blog.

A blog is more central to hot property Gossip Girl, in its second season, but this particular twist comes in 90210, the CW's reincarnation of Beverly Hills, 90210. Joining them this year is the network's third life-among-the-rich-kids soap opera, Privileged.

With this trio that panders to the fantasies of young women, along with a deal basically to lease its Sunday-night space to an outside agency, which has created two additional dramas, the network spawned by the merger of the old UPN and WB appears to have brought itself back from the edge of oblivion.

Adults around the country could find the two Sunday shows, which premiered last week and are produced by an outfit called Media Rights Capital, surprisingly fresh and entertaining - if they could find them at all on the high-numbered channels that carry them, including Philadelphia's CW57. The network doesn't really care if they do. Its entire business model is wrapped up in 18-to-34-year-old women. (But if 12-to-18-year-old girls tune in, that's fine, too.)

Counterintuitively, the push to lure the lasses lines up not behind gorgeous 18-to-34-year-old men, although there are plenty of them around on the CW, but behind wealthy high school girls.

Grown-up women, by and large, play them as gorgeous, manipulative shrews who use their considerable intelligence not to get good grades and into good colleges, but rather to outmaneuver one another and most of the clueless adults in their world, in a never-ending game of social one-upmanship and sex.

The game is rarely enjoyable. It's usually deadly serious, more like a 24/7 job than the kind of lighthearted high jinks an adult might look for in high school shows.

Real teenagers, too, often see life and death in mundane matters, but most of them, one suspects, have plenty of time to enjoy themselves frivolously, unlike the kids here. The innumerable gin-soaked parties they attend invariably conclude in degradation and ignominy for somebody.

The shows, triangulated in money-dripping enclaves around the country, do have significant differences.

Set in Manhattan's Upper East Side, Gossip Girl, almost as big a buzz-bucket among youth-obsessed media as Dawson's Creek was when it popped up on one of the CW predecessors nearly 11 years ago, is by far the most shameless and outrageous.

School is not even a sidelight, just a gathering place where impossible characters primp and preen and try to elbow one another toward the bottom of the social pile. Drugs and alcohol abound, and not only do many of the kids have on-screen revolving-door sex with one another, but some of them even do it on the floor with members of the older generation.

"I didn't sign up for some creepy love triangle with you and someone else's mom," an aggrieved young thing tells her wandering beau, who's servicing a duchess to obtain money to improve the cash flow in his home because the FBI has frozen the funds of his father - accused of fraud - who has fled to the Caribbean. The duchess doesn't look much older than the show's kids, but she's supposedly stepmother to the British lord whom one of the lead girls has lovingly brought home from Europe (but now said girl is having her doubts because he doesn't want to have sex with her).

"I'm not some delicate little flower," says the 17-year-old. "Show me you love me."

This is the show that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of girls must watch when it airs (Mondays, at the too-early hour of 8 p.m.) so they can talk about it Tuesday in high school and junior high. Most Mondays, Nielsen Media Research reports, the show finishes second in its time slot among 12-to-34-year-old females.

90210 (Tuesdays at 8) is finding similar success as it takes the shenanigans to the West Coast. It's centered on school, and much more upbeat, with several kids and parents actually trying to do the right thing, which could be why it gets about only about 80 percent of Gossip Girl's ratings among young females. Still, it's second in its time slot in that category, too, presenting a world where kids drive unconscionably expensive cars like Maseratis and Maybachs, the guidance counselor (Jennie Garth from the original 90210) spills out of her half-buttoned blouse, and wealthy girls chastise their mothers for not standing up to philandering fathers.

In the first episode a boy (admittedly the richest one in school) beats the notorious L.A. traffic by taking the family jet to a dinner date in San Francisco.

In the third show, Privileged (Tuesdays at 9), one of the 16-year-old sisters (played by a 21-year-old) is just as rotten and self-involved as any of the other rich kids on Gossip Girl or 90210, but the central character is her tutor, a winsome young woman struggling to make good use of her Yale degree.

She has been hired by a Palm Beach moneybags to help her granddaughters, left orphans years ago, get into Duke. The not-rotten sister actually wants to give it a try, but can't escape the clutches of her sister and the always beckoning social whirl. If it's martinis in Manhattan and pills in Beverly Hills, champagne flows like water here, along with the pretty colored cocktails.

Privileged centers on perky JoAnna Garcia as Megan Smith, and her travails becoming an adult while reining in her fatuous charges, which is probably why it's the least popular of the three with young women, most drawn to the unbridled fantasy riches and licentiousness of Gossip Girl. Privileged is actually funny at times, and not just because the opulence of its setting is berserkly absurd.

Pregnancy tests and chewing gum, Target and Macy's, tampons, eyelash makeup, electric shavers, fast food and cell phones are the advertisers on these shows, eager to burrow into the pockets of America's women and happy to pay the CW a nice premium for landing a concentrated audience of them, even if total viewership for these shows lands them at the bottom of the ratings.

But one commercial the other day, sold locally to CW57, seemed terribly out of place. "Real Girls," it trumpeted, an announcement that the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team was coming to town.

Real girls? Sweat? Exercise? Concerted effort toward a long-term goal? Ewwwwwwwwww.