A one-time Knots Landing vixen and former muse to Leif Garrett and Michael Bolton, Nicolette Sheridan stars in Dead Husbands as a vapid trophy wife who stumbles on a chain-letter murder plan among wealthy society wives and shortly sets about making her wimpy, nice-guy husband (John Ritter) one of its targets. Originally made for cable, Dead Husbands shares with many other made-for-cable films a weirdly restrained tone that keeps things from getting too weird or unconventional. A comedy that mistakes being glib and flippant about death with being savagely satirical, Dead Husbands is too lighthearted and tame to be effective as a black comedy or social satire, and too broad and underwritten to be effective as anything else. Of course, it doesn't help that the two main characters are little more than cartoons, with Ritter bland but competent as a put-upon good-guy shrink and Sheridan seldom even two-dimensional as a lecherous schemer with murder on her mind. Dead Husbands is watchable if never particularly inspired: It's ideal fodder for insomniacs poking about late-night TV for something inoffensive and unchallenging to wile away the hours, but not exactly the sort of film you'd make any sort of effort to seek out.