But in the show, which debuted on Oxygen on Tuesday, the ex-star is as tame as Aaron Spelling probably wished she had been on the sets of those two teen-throb series.

On first blush, the notion of cowardly and/or fame-starved people enlisting Doherty to dump their significant others would seem a recipe for train-wreck hilarity. Who could be better, with her reputation for nastiness and slight craziness, and her own spotty (to put it generously) relationship history?

Sadly, we see none of that on "Breaking Up."

Instead, we get Doherty made over as part relationship therapist and part righteous avenger. Imagine Dr. Phil with better hair and more botox. She listens sympathetically as guests describe their relationship woes, then offers to let their boyfriends or girlfriends down easy, in a way that will make the breakups fun. That's her term, fun.

But fun for the participants and fun for the viewers are entirely different things. There’s no entertainment value in watching boring people having amicable breakups. This is a lesson that daytime talker Maury Povich learned years ago.

Indeed, there's something anticlimactic about it all. In the first episode, one dumped boyfriend laughs in Doherty’s face. He couldn’t care less that his girlfriend has left him, since he’s got another one stashed away already. Well then, on to victim two.

Doherty delivers an ultimatum to this one, telling him he has to either propose to his girlfriend or let her go. Faced with such an impossible choice, he opts to propose, but it’s hard to imagine that a marriage based on emotional coercion, on national television yet, is ever going to last.

But never mind. We get the happy couple chatting with Doherty and thanking her for all her efforts while she smiles on, rather creepily.

Doherty does mention one of her own ex-husbands, though it's unclear which of her notoriously short-lived marriages she’s referring to. But otherwise we learn little about her that we didn't already know from the tabs.

She does rough up one guest, dumping her on behalf of the boyfriend who thinks she’s too controlling. The girl breaks into tears. But Doherty goes easy on another woman’s boyfriend, though an obvious sleaze who could stand a working over. She ends up consoling the girl. It’s all so disturbingly nice.

"Breaking Up" also suffers from a distinct whiff of fakery, setups as contrived as those on the last reality show Doherty hosted, Sci Fi’s "Scare Tactics."

One has to wonder: With her reputation, it would have been a natural for Doherty to play off it, to camp it up, re-embracing her image as an out-of-control terror. It's hard to imagine Oxygen signing her on for anything else, as a network with a mandate to push boundaries.

Viewers were certainly tuning in to see dragon lady doing her stuff. What they got was Doherty acting as a well-meaning matron of domestic good will. It may be her worst acting job yet.