by kellie abrahamson kabrahamson1@aol.com
When Sex and the City ended in 2004 fans were desperate for more and this year, one way or another, they’re getting it. On the one hand you have a Sex and the City movie set to be released in May. On the other hand you’ve got two new primetime shows currently on the air with producers from Sex and the City behind both. While the movie is sure to be a hit with the popular series’ rabid fan base, the jury is still out on how the far tamer network shows will fair.
Darren Star’s new show Cashmere Mafia hit ABC’s airwaves at the beginning of January. The series follows the lives of four ambitious women who met in business school and continue to be best friends while juggling their careers and love lives. Lucy Liu plays Mia Mason, a successful publisher who was dumped by her fiancé (Tom Everett Scott) after she received a promotion over him. She has her BFFs to console her, but each of them has issues too. Zoe Burden (Frances O’Connor) is married with two small children and, with the added pressure of being a high-powered investment banker, finds herself being stretched too thin, causing her performance to suffer in all arenas. Meanwhile, Juliet Draper (Miranda Otto), the Chief Operating Officer of a major hotel chain, discovers her husband (Peter Hermann) has been having an affair and must decide what to do about it. Then there’s Caitlin Dowd (Bonnie Sommerville), a top exec at a cosmetics firm who realizes that she may be a lesbian after falling for her company’s new ad rep (Lourdes Benedicto).
NBC and Sex and the City co-producer/author Candace Bushnell unveiled their series Lipstick Jungle last week. The show is nearly identical to Cashmere Mafia in tone and subject matter, which puts it at an immediate disadvantage since Cashmere Mafia has already aired five episodes and established itself among the target audience. NBC’s show centers around three highly successful best friends who are determined to have it all but have to deal with plenty of obstacles standing in their way. Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields) is a big shot film executive whose marriage is on shaky ground because her husband (Paul Blackthorne) feels overshadowed by her success. Fashion magazine editor-in-chief Nico Reilly (Kim Raver) is also experiencing some marital roadblocks. Her husband is so consumed with his own job that he barely notices she’s alive, a problem she’s forced to face head on when a hot younger guy (Robert Buckley) begins lavishing her with attention. Finally there’s free-spirited designer Victory Ford (Lindsay Price), a talented clothing designer whose latest line bombs on the runways at Fashion Week. She’s consoled by a multi-billionaire suitor (Andrew McCarthy) whose grand gestures make her both uncomfortable and intrigued at the same time. That last bit should be a joke, but it’s not.
Clearly, both shows are dead even in the highly-unrealistic and too-soapy-for-their-own-good departments and need to do much better in the ratings to stand a chance at making it beyond their first seasons. But the biggest problem facing them is that they just aren’t Sex and the City. The shows lack the humor and creativity that made the HBO series great. Still, both Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle are good for some shallow, guilty pleasure TV-watching and, currently adrift in a sea of reality shows due to the writer’s strike, that’s exactly what many people are looking for right now. In this early stage of the game Cashmere Mafia is the better of the two shows if only for consistently great performances from Miranda Otto and Lucy Liu. It’s a slight lead that Lipstick Jungle has a chance to overcome as new episodes air.
Cashmere Mafia can be seen on Wednesday nights at 10 pm on ABC. You can catch NBC’s Lipstick Jungle on Thursdays at 10 pm. Full episodes of both shows can be found online at ABC.com and NBC.com respectively.
Article Published in the 2-21-08 Issue of EU Jacksonville
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