All-Star Trash TV in ABC’s ‘An Inconvenient Woman’

There’s no mistaking the miniseries “An Inconvenient Woman” (airing in two parts Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) for anything other than trussed-up trash TV.

Hardly a moment of the four hours of supposed L.A. insider peeking in this tale of sex and dying in high society will ring true to an actual resident of the place. It’s based on a typically pithy Dominick Dunne novel, but feels like Judith Krantz or Jackie Collins armed with a battery of bon mots.

Will you hate yourself for watching? Obviously. Is it kind of fun at times? Sure.

A nearly all-star cast twirls its collective mustache throughout the piece. Jason Robards has never been more robust or less dignified as Jules Mendelson, a powerful financier, philanthropist and presidential pal who makes the twin mistakes of covering up a murder and taking on a mistress. “Be nude when I get there,” he coos to his new young blonde--an understandable sentiment given that the commandee is title character Rebecca De Mornay in a succession of ever-more-statuesque outfits.

The caricatures don’t end with this May-December affair: Mendelson’s wife is a cold-fish society scion (Jill Eikenberry doing a great Nancy Reagan impression). Through their delinquent son, the Mendelsons get mixed up with a Mafia thug (Joseph Bologna) and a Hollywood director with a deteriorating septum (Alex Rocco). All involved are being tracked by an unctuous, gay gossip columnist (Roddy McDowall, doing a dated character right out of the age of “Sweet Smell of Success”).

Our guide through this tangled web is a writer and newcomer to town (Peter Gallagher), who as a de facto investigator goes around asking tough questions about the bullet-riddled corpse that’s being labeled a suicide--and, amazingly enough, gets answers out of the private Bel Air folk and Hollywood male hustlers he barges in on. Must be those bedroom eyebrows.

John Pielmeier’s teleplay has about three bad lines (“I’ve been sleeping with you for how long now and I don’t even know you!”) for every good one (“Jules, we’re in the Valley. No one is going to recognize you”). Though his narrator expresses disdain for this millionaire crowd, the script bears the Dunne stamp of offering up an apologia for the wealthy even in the guise of satirizing them.

Naturally, the coincidence-driven plot depends on everyone running into everyone else constantly--including the mistress literally running her car into the wife’s on Rodeo Drive. Come to think of it, though, the script’s vision of L.A. as an extended small town may be its sole credible aspect.