`THE LOT' LOOKS AT 1930S HOLLYWOOD.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

There's a little confusion on ``The Lot.'' This limited series, playing tonight and Friday (and encoring Saturday) on the American Movie Classics cable channel, straddles the fence as to whether it's a nostalgic evocation of Hollywood's heady Golden Age, or if it's ``Larry Sanders Lite'' in period dress.

Silver Screen Pictures, a fictional studio, circa 1937, a factual year, is ``The Lot's'' cauldron of rather prissy, underheated passion. As the series opens, another hard-luck actress has taken a header off the Hollywoodland sign (``land'' wasn't taken from the landmark until 1949), which apparently is an impetus for all manner of glib japery.

``She always did overplay her exits,'' one character observes, while another adds, ``Destiny seems to have dropped her option.'' While these particular gags play well enough, many in the course of the episodes feel awfully forced, as the characters become caricatures who are a little too self-impressed with their own decadence and pithy cynicism. ``This is the longest I've talked about anyone other than me,'' says one. They're a mere step removed from those irksome action-flick characters who uncork a one-liner after killing someone.

That actress's demise opens a role in an upcoming production, one sought after by fresh-faced June Parker (Linda Cardellini), who as our story begins announces her intentions to become a star to her mother, Silver Screen's jaded yet innocent makeup lady Mary Parker (Stephanie Faracy). Mom blanches at the idea, but the studio thinks June is hot.

There are other subplots, such as a grating over-the-hill screen queen's efforts to reclaim her youth, or at least her stardom, and how a young studio gopher's aspirations to become a screenwriter are complicated when he falls for June. Woven through it all is a womanizing, Howard Hughes-like mogul named Roland White (Jonathan Frakes of ``Star Trek: The Next Generation'') and digs at real-life stars like Buddy Ebsen, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Gene Autry (which are tame by the standards established by ``The Larry Sanders Show'').

The second installment plays far more broadly than the others, to its detriment, and the final episode opens several months after the action in the previous three, leaving some key plot and relationship questions unanswered. It does, however, conclude with a moderately satisfying plot twist and leaves the door open for future episodes.

Performances are all over the map. Writer/creator Eric Mitz and his collaborator Barbara Romen didn't determine early on whether June is wholesome or vampish, so the appealing Cardellini (who is put to much better use on NBC's upcoming series ``Freaks and Geeks'') struggles with the lack of definition. Francois Giroday and Sara Botsford become somewhat tiresome as they deliver each of their clipped bon mots like they're in a bad production of an Oscar Wilde play, and Joseph Sicari is glaringly embarrassing in a small role as an immigrant director.

More successful are supporting players like Allen Garfield, who as the studio head does a fine impersonation of a beleaguered Alan Arkin character, and Holland Taylor as a radio gossip columnist. Perry Stephens, as duplicitous executive Jack Sweeney, nearly steals the show, reveling in his amorality with a civilized zeal.

Ultimately, though, ``The Lot'' is a little too mannered and quip-happy, too caught up in its romanticism of Hollywood chicanery. One character lauds Hollywood as being ``a sunny place with shady people, where the stars twinkle until they wrinkle.'' It's too cute by half, and it's unlikely many in show business - or any business, for that matter - would get that sentimental about having a lousy job. Would you hear a bookkeeper cheerfully call his firm ``a place where the only odd numbers are the zeroes you work for''? Only if ``The Lot'' had a scene in the accounting office.

The Facts

The show: ``The Lot.''

What: Four-part series focusing on the internecine backstage intrigue at a fictional Hollywood studio in 1937.

The stars: Linda Cardellini, Jonathan Frakes, Allen Garfield, Perry Stephens, Holland Taylor.

Where: American Movie Classics.

When: Parts 1-2: 5 and 10 tonight. Parts 3-4: 5 and 10 p.m. Friday. Parts 1-4: 1 p.m. Saturday.

Our rating: Two and a half stars

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- 2) At left, AMC's ``The Lot'' creates a fictional early Hollywood with, clockwise from top left, Jonathan Frakes, Steven Petrarca, Francois Giroday, Perry Stephens, Sara Botsford, Linda Cardellini and Stephanie Faracy. Below, Cardellini plays would-be starlet Jane Parker and Stephens is amoral movie executive Jack Sweeney.