Ellen Gray: No love for Hewitt in low-life 'Client List'

THE CLIENT LIST. 9 tonight, Lifetime.

"A MOTHER WILL do anything for her family," according to Lifetime's promos for "The Client List."

I wasn't aware Jennifer Love Hewitt had children.

And so, while I'm not prepared to judge the unidentified woman or women whose "true story" supposedly inspired this tale of small-town prostitution in a bad economy, I will say that for Hewitt, playing a woman who's long been judged for her physical attributes and turns to them for an income when the going gets tough might not be the smartest career move.

Not only does it suggest that the going is tough, something an actress coming off a long-running series like CBS' "Ghost Whisperer" shouldn't be looking to convey, but that there's "The Client List" itself, which is about as much a true story as "Amish Grace," Lifetime Movie Network's recent exploitation of the schoolhouse shootings in Lancaster County.

OK, that one fictionalized a dead girl and her entire family, establishing what we can only hope is a permanent floor for how low a TV movie can go.

Here, Lifetime's merely given Hewitt another excuse to wear lingerie to work. (Her "Ghost Whisperer" character's ability to see dead people seemed somehow rooted in her cleavage.)

Like Hewitt herself, Samantha Horton's from Texas.

A former beauty queen and mother of three, she's been raised by her hypercritical mother (Cybill Shepherd) to think that her looks are the only thing that matter, though she seems to have acquired enough education to have worked in physical therapy.

She also possesses a phenomenal memory, something that will become important not only in the compiling of the "list" that's much less of a plot point than you might expect from its position in the title, but also in the success that she finds as a somewhat overqualified massage therapist whose personal touch extends to remembering to ask about her clients' kids.

When she's not rubbing men the right way, Samantha's charged with pounding the movie's muddled message into viewers' heads.

A crude mix of "desperate times, desperate measures" and "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be hookers," it's largely undercut in a scene late in the movie when the wives of some of Samantha's clients show up at her door and things veer off in a different direction.

Let's just say that bananas are involved.

There's nothing that can be done to save "The Client List," which is just one of those movies that pops up on Lifetime every time the network's piled up enough points from its classier projects to make me think about retiring the title Television for Women Who Like to See Other Women Humiliated.

But I have to think that there's still hope for Hewitt, who might want to think about taking a cue from another Texas beauty: Farrah Fawcett.

The former "Charlie's Angels" star was a few years older than Hewitt is now when, apparently tired of being seen as just a fantastic body holding up a fantastic head of hair, she decided to do a very different TV movie based on a true story.

"The Burning Bed," in which she played the far from glamorous Francine Hughes, a battered wife who killed her husband after years of abuse, brought Fawcett her first Emmy nomination.

It was also among the career highlights cited in most of the obituaries that ran after she died last year.

With any luck, Hewitt will have many, many years to make us forget "The Client List."

But it wouldn't hurt to get started now. *

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