• Valentine, 8-9 p.m. Sunday, The CW

• Easy Money, 9-10 p.m. Sunday, The CW

The economy is worse than we thought. Even The CW is shoving aside its teenaged psalms to Jimmy Choo and Marc Jacobs for shows about loan sharks and outsourced deities. Next I'm afraid we'll see Henry Paulson on TV announcing that the Treasury Department has seized Gossip Girl and offering a reverse auction for Serena and Blair.

It hasn't quite come to that yet, but whether through prescience or luck, the two CW shows that debut Sunday echo with economic despair and anomie -- to such an extent that they almost sound like the death screams of a network that's chewing off its own leg as it thrashes helplessly in its final throes.

There's practically no other way to explain what a show like Easy Money -- a relentlessly downbeat tale of loan sharks and their scuffling, busted-luck clients -- is doing on a network otherwise populated by the glam-slam teens of 90210, Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill. If any fans of those shows accidentally tune in during Easy Money, their eyeballs are likely to explode all over their Dolce & Gabbanas.

That's not to say Easy Money is bad -- far from it. Original in concept, intelligent in execution, it's a scruffily Steinbeckian chronicle of life at the social and economic margins. Its protagonists (Easy Money doesn't have heroes) are the Buffkin family, who operate a payday-loan storefront sandwiched between a pawn shop and a topless joint in a seedy Phoenix strip mall.

Merry matriarch Bobette (Laurie Metcalfe, Roseanne) is undaunted by complaints about the 25 percent weekly interest on her loans. ''We help people,'' she insists earnestly, ''people that banks don't think are good enough.'' But prudently making sure nobody realizes just how profitable that help is, she warns the rest of the family to leave the new Hummer at home.

Bobette's son Morgan (Jeff Hephner, The O.C.) has inherited Bobette's vampiric skill for draining marks of their money, but not her avaricious zeal. ''We may not collect with a sawed-off pool cue,'' he argues, ''but we're still shylocks.'' Nonetheless, Morgan -- a regretful college dropout who likes to argue existential philosophy with the cashiers at shopping-mall bookstores -- stays at it, repossessing cars and even ventriloquist dummies from hapless clients to make them pay. But cracks are appearing in the Buffkins' world. A new group of loan sharks who do collect with pool cues and worse have moved into the neighborhood, and Morgan has blundered onto a family secret with potentially devastating repercussions.

One of the most striking things about Easy Money's keenly observed characters is how little difference there is between the Buffkins and their clients. They all inhabit a world of mean streets dappled with loopy get-rich-quick fantasies of homeopathic berry-juice monopolies and New Age pyramid schemes, winners and losers chosen at random by a weary and disinterested universe.

Victory confers no class -- a dinner party at the Buffkins' elegant suburban mansion still consists of a bucket of takeout chicken and a six-pack -- and defeat no dignity; Easy Money is resolutely unsympathetic to the Buffkins' desperate clients. ''There used to be a time, if you didn't have the money to buy something, you just didn't buy it,'' observes Morgan to a friend. ``My mother calls those the Dark Ages.''

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