Fear not, fans of rational portrayals of modern urban career women on television and film. Candace Bushnell's influence is almost gone from our lives. The Sex and the City authoress (or is she??) co-created a TV show last year called Lipstick Jungle that was basically a tired rehash of the SATC series but without all the fun swears and nudity and stuff. Well, that show was blessedly canceled yesterday, so we no longer have to deal with its particular brand of shoes-as-metaphor-for-longing ladybusiness. And now, oh my, Bushnell's satellite radio show has been euthanized as well. She was doing a show for Sirius XM radio called Sex, Success, and Sensibility, which was about how to make love like a perpetually neurotic and self-obsessed shopaholic. But then—in these horrible, ruined economic times!—she refused to take a 50% pay cut, so the station just out and out pulled the plug. So, that's sad for her I guess? But it's kind of a relief for us. Now if we could only stop those Sex and the City: For kids! books from coming out.

This is turning out to be a very bad week for Candace Bushnell. NBC cancelled Lipstick Jungle earlier this week. Now comes word that money-losing Sirius is discontinuing her weekly satellite-radio talk show, Sex, Success and Sensibility, after she declined to take a 50 percent pay cut. [Portfolio]

For a while it looked as if weekly topless scenes of Robert Buckley would keep Lipstick Jungle in business, but it seems that one man's perfect abs can only do so much: NBC has axed the Candace Bushnell adaptation after a move to the Friday lineup failed to make more viewers believe that massively powerful businesswomen juggling relationships, children, and perfect designer wardrobes would also have time to meet every day for breakfast, lunch, cocktails, and dinner. Of course our sympathies go out to the cast of Brooke Shields, Lindsay Price, and Kim Raver (as well as to the cast of My Own Worst Enemy, which NBC also canceled). But you know who we feel most sorry for? Bushnell's ballet dancer husband. This news is not going to improve her already volatile mood.

As Candace Bushnell continues promoting her latest novel One Fifth Avenue, more unsuspecting journalists are emerging from interviewing her vaguely traumatized, wondering what she has to be so temperamental about (other than the fact that her obsession with glitz and shopping is suddenly anachronistic) and especially now that the whole will they-won't they make the SATC sequel juggernaut is underway. But as an Independent reporter discovers, there's not much you can ask Bushnell without getting a testy reaction.

['Sex and the City' authoress Candace Bushnell promoting a book in London today; image via Splash]

If golddiggers of all persuasions are having a tougher time right now, that includes fictional ones like Janey Wilcox, the Victoria's Secret model whose pursuit of a very rich husband forms the story of Candace Bushnell's novel Trading Up. The book was in the process of being adapted into a Lifetime movie but suddenly, rues a network exec to the Times, "it was like the script had been written two years ago." Talking animals, however, are doing great: Beverly Hills Chihuahua has been killing it at the box office, which Hollywood studios will likely take as proof that audiences want anything but reality right now—as tempting as it might be to rush out films featuring villainous businessmen.

Last week I was killing time—which means I was reading Elle by myself at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge while waiting for a phone call—when I became completely captivated by their Candace Bushnell profile. I forgot about this until I saw this Q&A with the Sex and the City author in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "What do you think about the commentary about you on Gawker [and other snark-sites]?" it asks. To be sure, Bushnell has a young blogger in her latest book, which she derides as a "striking out at the world instead from behind the safety of his computer." But we have actually, seriously, learned from Bushnell—not the TV show[s], and definitely not the movie, but as a self-made woman obsessed not with status, but with class.Americans don't like to talk about class, or at least not about how it plays into sexual relationships. Instead, people use euphemisms like, "He went to Yale Law" when you yourself are a twenty-year-old East Villager who would quite honestly like to be taken care of. But! Let's put aside for a moment giving Bushnell the responsibility for "thousands of gallons of vomited Cosmos" and shoe fetishism and even the tired "Can women have sex like men?" question. (Answer: yes, no, and sometimes.) Sunday eve, I was remarking on how I loved the Real Estate section of the Sunday Times because it was "like porn" as it showed things "I'll never have." To which someone joked, "You never know, you might meet a really rich guy," and I replied, "the better idea is the one where I make a shitload of money myself." Which, let's be honest, I probably won't. But I could. Whenever gender or class is brought up, I'm almost always brought back to the period of time I spent, OK, stripping. It's like the extreme sport where gender and class intersect—not that you're supposed to talk about that! Via Elle:

Despite the fact that Candace Bushnell's new novel One Fifth Avenue features a character (descriptive name alert!), Lola Fabrikant, for whom Carrie Bradshaw is an avowed role model, do not accuse Bushnell of being self-referential. "Honey... get over it," she admonished an interviewer who dared to do so. "You gotta grow up. You gotta let go... of aaaaaall the jealousy." In her defense, she was inside a restaurant at the time and testy about not being able to chainsmoke, and the reporter was Australian, so she may have thought he said "self-reverential." And if we don't revere ourselves, who else will? [The Age]

Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell's new novel, about the denizens of classy apartment building One Fifth, contains an editor at fictional website Snarker (snarf!) named Thayer Core. He lives in the East Village and has the audacity to sit online all day, throwing e-bricks at people! (Who can afford the East Village anymore?) Yet! There's something hilarious and ironic about a former editor for this website reviewing One Fifth Avenue for the Observer. Take it away, Doree:

Who would have predicted that Carrie Bradshaw would possess the resilience of a cockroach in a nuclear war? Nearly five years after the final episode of SATC, her teenage years are being dreamed up by Candace Bushnell, and last night Michael Patrick King announced there'd be a sequel to the movie. But as for Bushnell's new book One Fifth Avenue, now that the economy's collapsed, does its focus on wealthy uppercrusters and consumerism mean that people won't want to read it? Bushnell has thought of various ingenious reasons that they will!

It stands to reason that a show about frazzled females in New York media might include a cameo by Emily Gould, the former Gawker editor now working on her six-figure "book of autobiographical stories" about being a frazzled female in new New York media. Via certain Observer staff Gould is just a degree or two of separation away from Lipstick Jungle creator Candace Bushnell. But after an email tip and way too much (20 minutes!) research, we've determined that those tattoos on the Lipstick extra's arms (above) just don't match up with Gould's own body art. So you (and we) should probably move on to thinking about more important things, like the implosion of Western capitalism. Or, you know, scrutinize this Gould-aping extra some more in the clip after the jump.

Oh, great: The children's division at HarperCollins is planning a novel based on the teenaged years of Sex And The City character Carrie Bradshaw. Sex inspiration Candance Bushnell will write the thing and HarperCollins will target it at both teenagers and older fans, making the novel perfect for parents who'd like to give it as a "gift" to their children before awkwardly reclaiming it once it's been read. And what sorts of sex scenes might whole families be enjoying once this book is published two years from now? The Observer's Leon Neyfakh used this question as an excuse to re-watch his entire collection of SATC videos:

» Zac Posen showed the kind of pretty dresses that made him famous. What has also made him famous, of course, is his dazzling knack for networking, which was in full effect with a starry audience of Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy, Marisa Tomei, Leighton Meester, Venus and Serena Williams, Anna Wintour, André Leon Talley, Bernadette Peters, Diddy, Julian Schnabel, Bette Midler, Juliette Lewis, Kate Mara, Jada Pinkett Smith, Veronica Webb, Joy Bryant, Rachel Zoe, Ingrid Sischy, and Fern Mallis. [WSJ, Wireimage]

Candace Bushnell has so much to answer for. First her literary career spawned a flood of mimics. Now the same is happening with TV: Variety reports that Bergdorf Blondes author Plum Sykes is writing a TV show for NBC entitled Mogulettes, "a half-hour comedy about female tycoons." The idea for the show, which will be written with Amy Harris, came from Sykes, apparently, and not from Bushnell's Lipstick Jungle, another NBC show about, oh yes, powerful businesswomen. To be fair, Mogulettes does sound different from Lipstick: It will center around "the leader of a cosmetics empire," which was Bonnie Somerville's character in Cashmere Mafia. Anyway, Variety points out that the version of Bergdorf Blondes Sykes developed for the WB died a death so, you know, small mercies.

As we reported yesterday, Candace Bushnell uses a character in her next novel to retaliate against the disrespectful new generation of journalists which has emerged since the Sex And The City creator gave up her relationship column in the New York Observer. The bogeyman of One Fifth Avenue is Thayer Core-"a blogger on one of those vicious new websites that had popped up in the last few years, displaying a hatred and vitriol that was unprecedented in civilized New York." But the thin-skinned author gives the gossip blogs far too much credit.

Sex and the City author and former Observer columnist Candace Bushnell has a new novel coming out, called One Fifth Avenue. It concerns the various doyennes and bratty socials who live at One Fifth Avenue—the most important Manhattan apartment building of our time. (It has "thick, pre-war walls"!) Gawker.com is mentioned by name throughout the book, as one of its writers makes life hell for its residents:

["Sex and the City" costumer Patricia Field with original "SATC" columnist Candace Bushnell at the film's New York premiere last night; image via Splash]

A Page Six reporter has sold her debut novel to Simon & Schuster. Paula Froelich's Mercury in Retrograde centers on three New York women: a newspaper reporter named Penelope Mercury, who gets fired; a wealthy socialite fashion editor, Lena "Lipstick" Lippencraff, and a newlywed corporate lawyer Dana Gluck, who moves out on her husband when she discovers he's having an affair. Finally, some insight into New York women who have it at all, but still feel unfulfilled, by attractive female New York journalist. Except we've been there before, so many many times.

As soon as deals were signed, sealed and delivered for SATC brainchildren Candace Bushnell and Darren Star to helm their own interchangeable shows on rival networks, the claws were out. Rumors of fights between the former successful partners, publicly voiced dismissals of the others' futures in primetime, and an overall tension among loyal SATC viewers concerned about their iconic creators' feud led to a predictable race-to-the-finish come winter pilot season. And now, according to the NY Daily News, we may have a winner. Today's rumor on which Menopause And The City spinoff is most likely to bite the dust first, after the jump...

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.)