"The Client List" With Jennifer Love Hewitt on Lifetime Since "The Client List" is being advertised with billboards on which each of Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts appears to be the size of a studio apartment, let's say this up front: It's hard to imagine a less sexy show about prostitution. Based on its first two episodes, Lifetime's "Client List" makes even a dead fish like HBO's "Hung" look steamy. Michael Desmond/A&E Television Networks, LLC In "The Client List," Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a Texas mother who takes a job in a spa after her husband disappears. Ms. Hewitt stars in this new series, beginning Sunday night, as Riley Parks, a Texas mom with money troubles. She returns to the work force at the Rub, a suburban Houston spa with tasteful décor and a staff of wisecracking, gold-hearted Southern masseuses. She's shocked when her first client asks her to pay special attention to his upper thighs and then tries to grab her lower gluteals. But when her husband disappears and the mortgage is due, she puts on a smile and starts giving the best little happy endings in Texas. This is not premium cable, however, and "The Client List" is nowhere near the occasionally explicit territory occupied, to varying degrees, by "Hung" and the Showtime series "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" and "Gigolos." On Lifetime a massage parlor is a combination of the "Steel Magnolias" hair salon and a particularly luxurious women's gym, with a tart but jolly den mother and mama-san (Loretta Devine) who takes the girls out for karaoke when they're feeling blue. The series is based on the 2010 Lifetime movie of the same title in which Ms. Hewitt played a similar character. The movie, in turn, was based on an actual massage parlor in Odessa, Tex., that was raided in 2004, resulting in the arrests of more than 60 clients, many of them prominent local citizens. The film followed a familiar Lifetime arc of desperation, sin and redemption, with Ms. Hewitt's character emerging from jail and finding a job as a waitress. The series can't go through that tidy arc in a movie-length two hours and will have to find ways to stretch the story out while deflecting what might seem like its more unsavory aspects. The daily grind of the job is left mostly to our imaginations - when Ms. Hewitt's hands slide beneath a client's towel, you know it's time for the next scene - and the question of what further extras the women might be asked to provide never comes up, though perhaps it will in future episodes. What we do see is a lot of young, bare, hilariously sculpted male flesh: the Rub's clients appear to have walked over in a group from Chippendale's. Otherwise the show is a stock Lifetime dramedy, with an occasional naughty spark in the writing ("Tips are great. The harder I work, the bigger they get.") and a largely female cast, including Cybill Shepherd as Riley's church-going, five-times-married mother. There is a mystery element, involving the secret past of Riley's absconded husband, and a romantic element, potentially involving the husband's sensitive but hunky brother. Most weirdly, there's a (non-sexual) therapeutic element, with Riley providing counseling for her clients, who just need some clarity in order to climb off the massage table and go back to their wives. Ms. Hewitt, in her first series since "Ghost Whisperer" on CBS, gives her usual determined, likable, one- or two-note performance, putting across the wistful moments and working hard on the comedy. You might think that a role as a suburban mom driven to sex work would allow her to relax and have some fun with her famously sexy body, as she did in her recent guest stint on "Hot in Cleveland," but the message she sends in "The Client List" is the one she usually sends: "Hey! Eyes up here! The Client List Lifetime, Sunday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time. Produced by Fedora Films and Jaffe/Braunstein, in association with Sony Pictures Television. Created by Jordan Budde; Jennifer Love Hewitt, Dannielle Thomas, Howard Braunstein, Mr. Budde and Efrem Seeger, executive producers. WITH: Jennifer Love Hewitt (Riley Parks), Cybill Shepherd (Linette), Loretta Devine (Georgia) and Colin Egglesfield (Evan).