TV Detail: The Starter Wife review. Episode 103—"Remains of the Snow Day"

In "Remains of the Snow Day," we experience Molly's most pointed movie-montage daydream. She's faking drug addiction at a ritzy rehab center when an every-Disney-movie fantasy produces her profusely apologetic ex-husband, the dubious-but-dreamy writing group instructor in a gold cape (above), and her garland-crowned seven-year-old, proclaiming "Kids are resilient! Divorce builds character."

So there we have it: the central conceit of the 2008 Starter Wife incarnation. While last year's Molly was caught up in the throws of separation and humiliation, the new series is committed to resiliency.

In this Starter Wife, Debra Messing is broke (well, she's the Chanel-wearing, private-school-PTA-mom version of hard-up, anyway). She's universally despised by her peers. To be fair, that was always the premise of the show: Molly Kagan. Hollywood divorcee. Pariah. But this time she's being rejected, not just because of the embarrassment of her ex-status and consequent fall from social grace (a construct that always felt a little unbelievable), but because she went and pissed off every power mom on the mansion-studded block.

During the first episode of the season, Molly's diary, in which she wrote some ultra-catty, column-style society gossip, was "lost." The next day, juicy tidbits (detailing events in the lives of neighbors and friends) began to leak out, one by one, on Dizzyland (the Hollywood dish blog). It didn't take long to peg the culprit, and so Molly went from the self-pitying antihero of the miniseries to the accidental, kind of martyr-ish, but also kind of bitchy, backstabbing gossip queen of the regular series. Awesome.

This dynamic—the new, fumbling, sometimes heartbreaking, but mostly happier and (most importantly) funnier Molly—lifts the show out from under the divorce shadow.

"Remains of the Snow Day" begins with Messing's de-vesting. Molly's arch-nemesis, Eve—the woman who represents all the other glam wives in the us-vs.-them mentality of the show—rallies a group of PTA ladies to vote Molly off the committee, demanding that she relinquish her crossing guard uniform (in retaliation for the most recent Dizzyland revelation: that Eve's implants are padded with the remains of her two cremated dogs).

In this episode, we get to see a little bit of the physical comedy reminiscent of Messing's Will & Grace days. After jacking Dizzy's laptop and clocking Zach-the-unfortunate-love-interest in the head with it—instantly immortalized on the BlackBerries of everyone from her rivals to her ex-husband—she retreats (literally) to play hookie at rehab.

So far the show is doing a pretty good job of keeping Molly's romantic life in the fantasy realm, but the series is clearly banking on viewership from the Sex and the City set, so as long as Molly's misadventures are chaste, her friends' love lives will supply the intrigue. Joan and Rodney are more interesting this time around, not only because they're each dallying in knotty affairs, but because the 2008 Starter Wife has decided that even Hollywood gossip-queen glam-a-moms can have good, earnest friends.

It seems only a matter of time until Molly finds herself with Zach, but if the series makes it through to a second season, it'll be the sisterhood triumvirate that has the viewer hooked.