GCB

Since Desperate Housewives is about to go to that upscale neighborhood in the sky, ABC is doing a lot of promoting its midseason replacement, GCB, which immediately follows the housewives on Sunday nights. The trailers have looked moderately interesting, and I couldn't figure out what GCB stood for until I looked it up on Wikipedia (Good Christian Bitches). So I figured I'd check it out.

Amanda Vaughn returns to her hometown of Dallas in disgrace, moving back in with mom, after her Ponzi scheme-concocting husband dies in a fiery car crash with his mistress in tow (and not in the passengers' seat). It's a comeuppance for her, since her former high school classmates -- Carlene, Sharon, Cricket and Heather -- are relishing her return so they can exact revenge for all the misery she put them through. Despite her checkered past she's the sympathetic character as we hope that she can put her life back together.

We love to watch hypocrisy, and the ladies do a lots of prosthelytizing in public, while acting in a not-so-do-unto-others way in private. Lots of attractive people wearing not so much (Amanda is forced to get a job at Bootie-licious, a fictitious version of Hooters; shirtless guys; one of the queen bee's daughter's top flies open during a cheerleader routine).

Housewives was pretty good in its first season and then followed that up with a miserable second season, and I never really tuned in after that (accelerating that was the fact that 2004-05 was when Family Guy really began to hit its stride).

And clearly ABC has a Dixie Desperate Housewives in mind. The danger is that GCB proves so derivative that it just looks like Wisteria Lane with a Southern twang. Still, the first two episodes set up the characters and conflict well, so it could be a pretty good recipe for success.

The acid test is -- will I flip over to NBC at 10:30 to see who gets cut from Celebrity Apprentice? It's fun to see who Donald Trump fires, but the GCBs are more fun to look at than The Donald. Thus far, it looks as though I'll probably be flipping back and forth between the two shows.