Dirge of the Jungle
It begins, of course, with shoes. Tonight's premiere episode of NBC's new series Lipstick Jungle opened with quick cuts of beautiful shoes walking. This is, after all, a series executive produced by shoe fetishist (actually, at this point, cultist) and Sex and the City columnist Candace Bushnell. We meet three frazzled New York ladies (bestest friends forever!) who are all beeswax about their high-profile jobs. Brooke Shields's Wendy is a film exec who's trying to get some Galileo movie off the ground before a rival studio snags it. Lindsay Price's Victory (yuck) is a fashion designer who's taken a critical drubbing of late. And Kim Raver's Nico is the editor of a celebrity, politics, and beauty magazine called Bonfire (of the Vanities Fair, perhaps?) They have their own quirks: Wendy can't wear green! Victory likes cupcakes! Nico is sort of a feminist! And they all have their problems: a husband who's jealous of her success, a stalling career, and adultery, respectively. (More, w/ video!, after the jump.)
There are men, too, most notably Andrew McCarthy as a suitor for Victory, who states with a cocked head and a wry smirk "They say all men are asses and all women are crazy." Oh. Oh okay. The whole thing is even more dreadful than you'd think and exactly as awful as ABC's doppelgänger series Cashmere Mafia. Really, the only two likable bits are the sort-of sexy wooing of Nico by a younger man and the reasonably pleasant Brooke Shields. Can these women "have it all"? I suppose you'll need to tune in to find out, though I don't recommend it. If you are strangely compelled to watch, I suggest you get blindingly drunk on something beforehand (not cosmos). It's really the only way I could stomach another round of watching these dopey neurotics teeter off, in heels too high, into oblivion. Here's a clip of the ladies shopping and gabbing and learning. Welcome to the Jungle. You're gonna diiiiieee.