There aren’t many shows where the size of an earring can stir up controversy.
Welcome, then, to “Cashmere Mafia,” the new midseason drama from “Sex and the City” creator Darren Star. In one scene in tonight’s premiere, Lucy Liu sports a giant pair of gold sparkly plastic hoop earrings. While Liu, who plays publisher Mia Mason, thought the accessory made a “statement about the character without a lot of exposition,” one of the men on the set thought it was too distracting.
The unnamed man wielded enough clout to delay filming. “We had to stop production and have a meeting,” says Liu, somewhat incredulously. “We had to stop filming and deal with this earring. It just what it is.”
The earring, obviously, made it into the pilot of “Cashmere Mafia” and best symbolizes the attention to fashion detail being lavished on a show groomed to be a ‘Sex and the City’ for grownup women. Patricia Field, the designer on the iconic HBO comedy, joined the show when it was picked up by ABC and you can see her touches everywhere: colorful vintage costumes mixed with sleek black cocktail dresses. When Liu, as publisher Mia Mason, shows up at the west side Heliport wearing plaid shorts and knee socks to woo a client who’s off to play golf, it’s brings flashbacks of Carrie Bradshaw walking a fashion tightrope between fabulousness and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” camp.
Yes, “Cashmere Mafia” is another stepchild of “Sex and the City.” The networks have been looking for another incarnation of that show since it went off the air in 2004. It has the requisite squad of four women slinking, panther-like, through corridors of power and desire. It has the glittering party scenes, the clever-yet-empty New York repartee between men and women, women and women, clients and power brokers. It doesn’t have much of the humor, though.
Liu insists the show is different enough to stand on its own. “If someone had pitched this show to me as the next ‘Sex and the City, I would never have gone and sat down with Darren,” she says. “I would never want to follow that. It would dilute the essence of the original. No one wants to go out [on stage] and follow ‘Purple Haze.'”
The women on this show are older, more experienced and jaded. And that might be the hook for viewers stupefied by the banalities of ABC’s other Wednesday night chick show, “Private Practice,” now on hiatus. “Cashmere Mafia” has no illusions about romance and examines the battle between the sexes at every bitter, exhausting turn. One engaged couple (Liu and guest-star Tom Everett Scott) ends up competing for the same job, interrupting foreplay to schedule critical business meetings on their BlackBerrys. One longtime married character (Miranda Otto) ignores her husband’s serial philandering because she doesn’t want to be a single mother going to parties by herself and decides to punish him by proving to him that two can play the adultery game. One character (Bonnie Somerville) becomes so fed up with men that she eagerly embraces the advances of another woman.
The message of the show is that a woman stands to lose a lot in the pursuit of having and keeping it all because someone – her husband, her boyfriend, even the nanny, for God’s sake – is likely to betray her. Every four scenes or so, the women, trim, toned and dressed in black, as if going to their own Fashion Week funerals, alight from taxis to wash away their sorrows with martinis, champagne and plenty of pinot grigio.
These are the ladies who liquid-lunch and some viewers will pick out the hot spots featured in the show: Guastavino’s, The Gansevoort Hotel, Et Tu, among others. Filming at these locations gives the show some authenticity and pizzazz and the stars welcomed the chance to experience New York on production breaks.
“New York is a character in our show,” says Somerville, who plays Caitlin Dowd, the most sexually adventurous of the four women. Somerville grew up in Brooklyn and has lived in Los Angeles for the last 10 years. “In L.A. when you’re shooting on location, you need a car to get anywhere. I loved shooting on Little West 12 Street near Pastis and the Gansevoort. We had our lunch breaks and we could go have a really nice lunch. People came back to the set with shopping bags.”
The other stars of “Cashmere Mafia” are Australian. Miranda Otto, who plays Juliet Draper, the chief operating officer of a major hotel chain, was born in Brisbane and is best known for her role as Eowyn in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Perth-born Frances O’Connor left a fabulous career on the London stage to joining the “Mafia” cast as Zoe Burden, a multitasking investment banker who troubleshoots nanny problems while plotting corporate strategy.
For both actresses, the move to the U.S. reflects the growing acceptance of foreigners in American roles as well as the global nature of television and movie production today. “I was in L.A. looking at film projects. The roles are actually boring or Julia Roberts is already doing them,” Otto says. “So, my agents said, ‘Why don’t you read some pilot scripts?’ I thought about it for a year and decided that [television] is what I really want to do. People don’t get out to the movies. I’m more likely to watch television. That’s why women are reflected on television. Because they’re watching.”
As Zoe Burden, an investment banker with two children and an architect husband, Frances O’Connor may have the role on “Cashmere Mafia” that most women will relate to. She’s the one with the good marriage, the lively family life and the great job.
“The show gives you a good idea of what it’s like to be a woman in the workforce these days,” she says. “Zoe’s not going to be having affairs with people every week and I’m cool with that.”
O’Connor researched her role with a mergers and acquisitions trader in London’s Primrose Hill section, where she lives. Somerville, who plays the marketing vice-president of cosmetics company, didn’t need to research the business world. Her mother’s mother, Maureen, works at Goldman Sachs in New York. Through her mother, Maureen, who works at Goldman Sachs in New York, she met many successful businesswomen. For Liu, the trick of having all these high-powered women characters on one show is never to forget their sensitivity.
“I think the writers do a good job in the way they keep the integrity of somebody who would be the C.O.O of a company,” she says. “They show the vulnerability which balances them. They can show it’s really difficult to be in a position where you tell some man what to do, then turn around be a girlfriend.”
CASHMERE MAFIA
Sunday, 9 p.m. and Wednesday, 10 p.m., ABC