'Beach Girls'

Luanne Rice's best-selling novel about love, loss and life lessons is the perfect fodder for a female-friendly, weekly six-hour television series from Lifetime -- long enough for viewers to get richly involved in the characters' lives, brief enough not to run into too many glitches in the script. All told, at least from what the first two episodes show us, "Beach Girls" is not a half-bad way to spend a few summer nights.

Rob Lowe plays high-powered Boston attorney Jack Kilvert, a recent widower and father of a teenager (that part is a little hard to swallow at first, but you'll get used to it). Kilvert and his daughter, Nell (Chelsea Hobbs), come back to the beach town where they own a summer home. It turns out that Jack's wife, Emma, has just died in a car crash and Jack thinks he and Nell might have some rest and relaxation in light of recent events.

But Jack also is one of those fathers who means well but does not always think straight. He gets himself a girlfriend and brings her along to the cottage as well, which hurts Nell deeply. She now has become the rather bitter teenage daughter on the verge of growing into womanhood. A deeply understanding father would be a good thing at this point.

But of course, there are women in the town who can give Nell the love and support she so desperately needs, especially during those moments when Jack can't manage the task himself. It turns out that Nell's mother grew up in this beach town. Her once-close friend, Stevie Moore (Julia Ormond), still lives there. She's now an artist who lives a reclusive life but is just enough of a surrogate mother for Nell. A little later on in the story, Jack's sister, Maddie (Katherine Ashby), also comes to town. As it turns out, however, Jack isn't speaking to her because she was driving the car in which his wife died. He can never get over that fact and makes it a point to keep Maddie out of his and Nell's lives.

But as we know, nothing stays put for long in a miniseries. Jack and Nell must find a way to trust each other again, and Nell must recover the memories of a mother she misses terribly. Most importantly, the viewer gets the opportunity to see how life patterns repeat themselves.

The "Beach Girls," who once were Emma, Stevie and Maddie -- yes, the previous generation -- soon reinvent themselves in Nell's own life: She meets two girls in town, and the three form their own version of the trio. Life goes on, at least long enough for us to ask the big questions: Will Jack come around to understanding his daughter's anguish? Will he and Stevie get closer in the end? Will he and sister Maddie finally make amends? It isn't tough to answer these questions, even long before the last hour of the series has played itself out.

Director Paul Shapiro gets some good performances here, working with strong material from scriptors Edithe Swensen and Elle Triedman, who turn Rice's novel into sometimes compelling television drama. The cast is first-rate, and it's sometimes even hard to notice those silent spots and slow turns in the story and pace. Osmond, a bit distant throughout, is still compelling to watch. In general, the actors are very low-key throughout the story, a problem at first but, like everything else in this agreeable series, something we can live with in the end. It isn't hard to get hooked.