As any younger child can attest, it’s wildly unfair to make assumptions founded on an older sibling’s attributes. Yet in the case of Lipstick Jungle, the new TV series based on the Candace Bushnell novel, it’s hard not to make comparisons to the wildly successful Bushnell-derived series Sex and the City.
So maybe we should start by discussing the differences. SATC was a half-hour HBO comedy, Jungle is an hour-long NBC drama-with-comic-elements. While Carrie Bradshaw and her friends were successful career women, the three main players here hold high ranking titles among the upper echelons of Manhattan’s elite. Jungle makes it clear that the ladies got to where they are through hard work; in the first three episodes, the Jungle crew has logged more time in the office than the City gals did during their entire six seasons.
Already we’re seeing that Lipstick Jungle isn’t going to offer City’s brand of escapist fun. The driven main players are the fantastically named Victory Ford (played by Lindsay Price), a talented designer forced to downsize her company and work her way back up to the top; Nico Reilly (Kim Raver), an editor-in-chief at the Vanity Fair-like Bonfire magazine, and Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields), who heads up Parador Pictures. In the second episode Victory suggests they get a bottle of wine with lunch, but we never see them drink it – these ladies clearly have more on their plates than long liquid lunches. As if careers weren’t enough, Nico is stuck in a sexless marriage and Wendy has a family including two kids to deal with.
The show might sound so far like No Sex and the City, but fear not. Nico has already partaken in steamy extra-marital sex with a hot young photographer’s assistant, and Wendy is being romanced by cute billionaire Joe Bennett, played by ‘80s heartthrob Andrew McCarthy – think Mr. Big, but nicer and more socially awkward. For a show trying to strike a realistic note, there are also some wonderfully over-the-top elements in each week’s plot lines. Sure, like Wendy, many working women worry over doing a good job raising their kids, but how many are threatened by a defamatory book written by their former nanny? On the opposite side of the spectrum, you’d think Victory and Joe could occupy themselves in New York City, but last week’s episode found him flying her to Paris for an early dinner, and getting her back in time for a NYC party with Nico and Wendy.
As with its predecessor, one of Jungle’s strengths is its portrayal of strong female friendships. How well this show does may very well depend on the chemistry that develops between its three leading ladies. Each actress seems well cast, and Raver is a stand-out as Nico, but so far the scenes in which the ladies hang out don’t sparkle the way the brunches and bar talk did in SATC. Writers, quick, get these ladies a few cosmos and let them loosen up!
While Jungle may not hook viewers as quickly as SATC, nor become a cultural touchstone, it still seems worth watching, with some nicely building tensions and plot twists. The photographer’s assistant has already slapped Nico with a sexual harassment suit, and Victory’s billionaire romance looks destined to fail. So far, Lipstick Jungle is striking an appropriate balance between career and family issues facing working women, and how-the-other-half lives escapist fun.
Lipstick Jungle airs Thursdays at 10 on NBC.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
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