Marc Malkin

ABC/Vivian Zink

Billy Baldwin doesn’t really want to do it, but if his new television series Dirty Sexy Money is a hit he's gonna have to move his family to Hollywood.

The Long Island native is nervous about what Los Angeles could do to him, his wife, Chynna Phillips, and their three kids. “I’m just so freaked out about raising kids on the West Coast,” Baldwin told me in a phone interview earlier today. “I’m certainly not going to complain. If I’m on a hit series shooting in Los Angeles, I’m blessed! But I’m biased to East Coast kids. I love that East Coast edge and that East Coast attitude.”

And stories about Phillips’ childhood  in L.A. certainly don’t help: She’s the daughter of the Mamas and the Papas cofounders, John and Michelle Phillips.

“When you look at the kids she grew up with, one is more f--ked up than the next,” Baldwin says. “To have John Phillips as your father, then having Michelle living with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and dating Mick Jagger...it’s obviously a highly volatile, unstable upbringing."

But he’s quick to add that he's “got nothing to worry about, because Chynna is doing an incredible job.”

Funny enough, Dirty Sexy Money is all about complete family lunacy. Baldwin plays Patrick, the politician scion of the Darling family, a superrich Upper East Side high-society brood. The series, premiering tomorrow night on ABC, is already being hailed as the new Dynasty.

Donald Sutherland costars as Patrick’s overbearing father, Tripp. “I think that the relationship between Tripp and my character is very sort of Joe Kennedy and Jack Kennedy and Joe and Bobby,” Baldwin says. “And obviously with some funny little skeletons in the closet.”

Jean Baptiste Lacroix/WireImage.com

Who’s in Patrick’s closet? A secret transsexual lover named Carmelita, played by real-life transsexual Candis Cayne (right). “Ironically, with all the dysfunction going on in our show, people who have watched episodes two through six are saying that the most sweet, normal and most functional relationship on the show is the one between her and I,” Baldwin says.

And he says he had no trepidation about their love scenes. “She’s the hottest woman on set,” Baldwin says. “Every time she walks across the set or across the lot, she has Teamsters that are veering off course and crashing their golf carts.”

Dirty isn’t the only thing on Baldwin’s mind these days. He also put together an incredible online auction benefiting his mom’s Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund. I’ll have more on that tomorrow. I’m also going to tell you what Baldwin thinks about his brother Alec’s recent loss at the Emmy Awards.