The minds behind My Network TV, the offbeat new network experiment, aren't reinventing the entertainment wheel. They're just giving it a new escapist spin with a female-appeal eye-candy plan: all soap operas all the time.

The shows are rooted in the wildly popular telenovela format — a linked story line that unspools serial style. OK, it's wildly popular in Latin America and other countries around the world.

Now those sly-as-a-Fox folks at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media behemoth are channeling the jauntier telenovela sensibility into an Americanized melodramatic mix of catfights and possibly campy delights. My Network TV premieres today on more than 160 TV stations across the country, including Honolulu's KFVE, popularly known as K5.

The My Network lineup — two hour-long series airing at 7 and 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, with weekly recap shows at 7 and 8 p.m. Saturdays — is headlined by Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild as dueling divas in the glossy style industry potboiler "Fashion House."

The network's other nightly attraction, "Desire," features a young cast of attractive unknowns in a sibling rivalry odyssey of two brothers on the run from the Mafia who fall for the same sexy woman.

"The appeal of this format is the fast-paced storytelling," says Paul Buccieri, head of programming for Twentieth Television, the studio producing the shows. "There's this momentum that builds because there's a cliff-hanger every night. And there's a sense of urgency for the audience because they know the story's going to end."

Unlike daytime soap operas, which can roll on successfully for decades, each of the My Network series run for 65 episodes over 13 weeks, until "Desire" and "Fashion House" careen to a presumably hectic conclusion. The shows will be followed in December by two new telenovela-style dramas and so on throughout 2006-2007 — eight series and 52 weeks of programming without a rerun.

"I think that's where there's a great opportunity for success," says Buccieri. "While the other networks are showing reruns, we're all original. And the viewer knows there's always someplace to go where there's fun, guilty-pleasure programming."

Guilty pleasures or not, the prospects for success of any new network are never guaranteed, particularly in an intensely competitive television landscape of wildly expanded choices.

The fledgling My Network operation has been quickly stitched together from many TV stations left out in the cold with the formation of the new CW network, a joint venture of CBS Corporation and Warner Brothers that merged rivals UPN and the WB.

It's not exactly a coincidence that My Network TV has that quirky name. News Corp, home to the Fox network as well as cable's FX, Fox News Channel and National Geographic Channel, also owns the booming MySpace.Com online juggernaut.

Some industry observers are skeptical of My Network TV's chances of making a big early splash.

But others point to the potential of the telenovela format to attract a female audience, which could help turn My Network TV into a popular entertainment destination.

Plus, Twentieth Television isn't being wild and crazy with expectations or with expenses, reportedly spending only $200,000 for each hour-long episode of "Fashion House," "Desire" and future series starring Tatum O'Neal, Maria Conchita Alonso and others. That's a fraction of the $2 million or more that the major networks routinely spend for an hour of "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" or "CSI."

Despite the lean, mean budgets, "Fashion House" and "Desire" each possess a sleeker, filmed look than the sometimes claustrophobic, videotaped daytime soaps.

Also, My Network TV saves money by adapting all its series from telenovelas that have previously aired in other countries. Instead of a staff of writers pumping out new scripts, Twentieth Television has "adapters" who merely translate the original series into English with tweaks for American slang and sensibility.

By keeping costs low, Network TV may have the chance to avoid oceans of red ink and become a profitable, moneymaking proposition somewhat sooner rather than later. Though UPN and WB each managed to carve out a marketable niche, serving younger audiences and creating some memorable TV series (e.g., "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Gilmore Girls," "Veronica Mars"), they "could not make it in a financial sense," says Sarah Norat-Phillips, president and general manager of WMYD-TV, the My Network TV channel in Detroit.

So the merger into CW became an economically sane solution.

Now it's My Network TV's turn to play prime-time entertainment roulette.

Bo Derek, Morgan Fairchild, catfights and mindlessly escapist delights — will America buy that? The folks at My Network TV seem to be maintaining a sense of humorous perspective about the elaborately sudsy enterprise.

"We like to call it 'Pretty People With Problems,' " jokes Twentieth Television's Buccieri, describing an in-house nickname for the My Network series. "These shows are what they are. They're over-the-top guilty pleasures. They're fun, they're light. You watch and you get hooked."