Review: NBC's 'Lipstick Jungle'

BY DIANE WERTS | diane.werts@newsday.com

February 7, 2008

I hate "Lipstick Jungle" so much, I may burst into tears and stamp my foot and screech "I want a cupcake!"

I loathe this new NBC show so, I may shrug off my husband and fall for the next faceless young guy who gazes into my eyes at a bar and purrs, "You are amaaaazing," and writes his phone number on my thigh in marker while pawing me in the ladies room.

I so detested watching this tripe that I hoped some billionaire would send his private jet for me from halfway around the world, and kiss me to wake me up, or fit my foot in a glass slipper, or put a crown on my head and swathe me in pink frills and take me to Disneyland for ever and ever and ever!

That would make about as much sense as the sick princess fantasy claptrap being foisted on us in Thursday's vaunted "ER"/"L.A. Law"/"Hill Street Blues" NBC drama slot.

"Lipstick Jungle" is - much like ABC's "Cashmere Mafia," only more so - about punishing women for straying outside the fairy tale. If you don't wait for your prince, if you try to outdo him instead, by achieving for your own self, then men will leave you, or never be with you, and men you work with will connive against you and circumvent you. Or worse (I hope you're sitting down), your husband may brush his teeth in front of you!

This is among the horrors that befall Kim Raver ("24"), playing a publishing bigwig who seeks relief from her dull spouse and scheming co-workers by bedding some anonymous hottie. Things are bad for Brooke Shields, too, as a powerful movie exec whose over-artsy director won't "let" her fire him and whose husband (Paul Blackthorne) is all sulky 'cause she's got more money and mojo. And poor Lindsay Price, she of the tears and the stomp and the cupcake, has to dry her tears after her fashion line goes poof by getting housefuls of flowers and private jet rides from said eccentric richie (Andrew McCarthy).

As in "Cashmere Mafia," everything in these "commanding" women's lives is out of control - job, men, kids. They're ineffectual, and desperate. Supposedly supportive best pals, they relate to each other mostly through self-help pep talk pap. And shopping, natch. While nothing in "Lipstick" is as overtly self-hating as "Cashmere's" pilot line, "Look at what a man gives up to be with one of us," NBC's effort thuds harder for trying to be more serious than ABC's bouncy-breeeezy hour of emotional cutting.

Comparing either of these punish-the-victim sagas to "Sex and the City" (even if "Cashmere" is by the same producer, Darren Star, and "Lipstick" comes from another book by "Sex" author Candace Bushnell) is laughable. For all its comedy, HBO's half-hour was about substantial women who were comfortable with themselves and radiated emotional honesty. NBC's superficial knockoff is just "Lipstick" on a pig.

LIPSTICK JUNGLE. Three executive city women who've achieved it all still can't buy love, or respect, or scriptwriters with a brain. When does "ER" come back? Series premieres Thursday at 10 on NBC/4.