Mob tale is clearly made by Lifetime

Alyssa Milano plays a cop's widow who turns to crime. (Lifetime television)

As soon as you start watching "Wisegal," the Alyssa Milano mob story that airs tonight on Lifetime, you can't escape that limp feeling of familiarity: This is such a Lifetime movie.

What that means, precisely, is hard to articulate - like looking for a pair of pumps or the right shade of lipstick, you sort of know it when you see it. Yes, there are some technical giveaways: the bright lighting and overdone makeup; the point-and-shoot camera angles; the stock-sounding music, all arpeggios and strings that arise at dramatic moments. (There's a post-coital "serious thinking" theme that actually made me giggle.)

But it's not just the structure; it's the spirit of the thing, some timeworn tapestry of oversimplified plots and undersimplified emotions, plus a story that rises to a suitably empowering end. NBC's "30 Rock" captured the mood this season with its faux-Lifetime movie about a dog-bite victim, called "A Dog Took My Face and Gave Me a Better Face to Change the World: The Celeste Cunningham Story."

Though "Wisegal," according to the press kit, is "inspired by a true story," it starts off with a more promisingly concise title, plus the suggestion of a three-dimensional protagonist. The film begins with a voice-over from some time in the future, read by the grown son of our heroine, Patty Montanari: "Nobody chooses the devil. The devil chooses you. He chose my mother the day she was born."

Patty, it turns out, does engage in some bad behavior, largely involving trafficking money and waving guns around while never firing them, but she isn't really bad. She's just an alpha mom, out to do good for her sons - a woman with Lifetime-worthy moxie.

When her nice cop husband dies and leaves her with two small boys, dead broke but energetic and suitably hot, she first starts to make money by hawking illegal cigarettes for a small-time gangster. Before long, she's recruited and romantically wooed by a higher-up mob foot soldier, played by the ever-pretty Jason Gedrick, who immediately gives her control of a run-down diner, which she instantly converts to a nightclub with a drag show. This attracts the attention of the big boss, played by James Caan, who has clearly forgotten anything interesting or true-to-life about Sonny Corleone. He swiftly recruits her to transport illicit money from Canada.

It all happens with great haste, scant concern for logic and pacing, and a near-absence of credible emotion. Milano frowns and furrows her brow from time to time, mostly in the interest of expressing annoyance, but no hint of fear or even concern ever crosses her face, and she sasses gangsters as if they were schoolboy playmates of her sons. "You kiss your mother with that mouth?" she says to a couple of Canadian mobsters, upon their first meeting.

"The Sopranos" gave us a gut-wrenching glimpse of what happens to women who get entangled with the mob: one memory of Adriana is worth a thousand cautionary tales. But Patty is charmed, down to her relationship with a kindly FBI agent (are they really so nice when they ask you to wear a wire?) and her good fortune in getting involved with mobsters who are remarkably open to reason. All she needs to do is show off that trademark moxie and they're all doing her bidding.

It's a simple story - You go, goomah! - and when I went back and re-listened, I realized it was all in that early voice-over, when Patty's son muses on his mother's relationship with the devil. "All he had to do was break her spirit," her son says. "Turns out, that wasn't so easy. No matter what he threw at her, she came back swinging." The devil knows a lot about how Lifetime movies work.