ONCE upon a time, there were three girls. No, wait, that’s the wrong show. OK, let me start again.
Once upon a time (like now) there were three high-powered women who have it all. They are best friends (I swear, I will never say BFF) who live in NYC and are each at the top of their game in glamorous, high-profile fields.
They wear fabulous clothes and discuss relationships, kids and work. Two of them are married (kids included) and one is single.
Oh, wait, that’s the wrong show again. Oh, wait, there are two shows exactly alike now, aren’t there?
Earlier we had “Cashmere Mafia” from Darren Star (creator of “Sex and the City“) and now we have the equally hyped “Lipstick Jungle.”
They are virtually indistinguishable in many ways, although each is interesting and not interesting in their own ways, because they both came out of Candace Bushnell’s book. But don’t tell that to Star (see above), who reportedly doesn’t get along with Bushnell anymore.
“Lipstick” concerns the lives, as I said, of three women. There’s Wendy (Brooke Shields), as the head of a movie studio (in NYC yet!) who has kids and a husband who is jealous of her success. She’s a lovely woman (wearing so much makeup she looks nuts) who gets a bad rap when her former nanny writes a “Nanny Diaries”- type book about her. Then, there’s Nico (Kim Raver of “24“), editor of a “Vanity Fair”-type magazine, who looks like a modern-day Morgan Fairchild without the big hair and is married to a guy who doesn’t respond to her sexual overtures. What’s a girl to do? Have a giant affair with the assistant to the Annie Leibovitz-type photographer, that’s what. They do the nasty right under the giant round window of a public place so God and everyone else gets to see her head bobbing up and down. She is woman hear her roar so she’s always on top, so to speak.
Finally, there’s Victory (Lindsay Price), a fashion designer whose brilliant couture biz is shrinking faster than, er, cashmere in the washing machine. To compensate, she’s got a new bazillionaire boyfriend, Joe (Andrew McCarthy), who takes her to Paris and buys her Coco Chanel’s own dress form. Victory always (make that always) wears a cocktail dress with matching coat, upswept chignon, and giant earrings, like she’s channeling Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” 24/7.
To add anger and selfishness to these already clichéd characters who are sort-of likeable, there’s the enemy, Jane Lasher (“Lasher” – get it?), a mean book publisher, played by Lorraine Bracco. Unfortunately, the brilliant Bracco’s lines are so terribly written that Jane Lasher herself would throw her pages into the street and fire the author.
Lasher actually spits out things like, “Look! I know who your BFF is!” (again, see above) and, “Unless you came here to pay my dry cleaning bill – then beat it!” What?
Tragically, everyone has cornball lines that they have to deliver, some worse than others.
Well, you get the picture. All three actresses deserve better dialogue than they are given. But the clothes? They speak volumes.
“Lipstick Jungle”
Thursday night at 10 on NBC