[Brooke Shields and Kim Raver, stars of the odious "Lipstick Jungle," at NBC up-fronts in New York today. Inexplicably, their show was picked up for another season. Image via Splash]

No! It was supposed to go away! Despite terrible reviews and middling ratings, Sex and the City columnist Candace Bushnell's television series Lipstick Jungle, about successful career ladies in Manhattan (but there are only three of them, and two are married, so it's completely original) has been given a small reorder. Evidently NBC was pleased enough with its women 18-34 numbers, so will send the three idiots stumbling down the street for six more episodes. [Variety via Observer]

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.)

Had your fill of tragicomedies involving lip melanoma and drugged up Packages today? Us too! That's why we are calling your attention to this heartfelt, almost too-adorable-for-words diary entry penned by original Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy. You see, Slate commissioned McCarthy to keep a diary to detail what life is like on the estrogen-fueled set of Lipstick Jungle. And while he's certainly no Bret Easton Ellis when it comes to prose, his whimsical musings on why shooting a series in New York "feels much like it does when one is first falling in love" should at least get him an offer from Harlequin.

[Brooke Shields outside her trailer while filming her new show "Lipstick Jungle" in New York City yesterday; image via Splash]

Among the new shows for spring, you can catch ABC's new sitcom, Cashmere Mafia, in which Lucy Liu plays Mia, a stylish Manhattan magazine editor. Who sounds much like a character from NBC's new show, Lipstick Jungle, starring Brooke Shields. The novel concept that women can achieve power and independence through magazine layout must simply be in the air—two great television minds influenced by the same muse! Of course, this being television, let's be sensible: two networks came simultaneously to a tired cliché of girlish career ambition which has historically produced semi-decent ratings. How tired? Despite Darren Star's affection for the publishing world (besides 'Mafia,' he's also got a pilot in the works about a book publicist called "Literary Superstar"), it's been a long time since magazines were the pinnacle of real-life occupational glamour. And how many other TV shows have been based on the exact same premise over the last couple of decades or so? Quite a few!

Last night, apartments in what is known locally as the ugliest building in Greenpoint were seriously papered. Were they eviction notices? Utility shut-offs? No! Just a note from Candace Bushnell and friends.