Meanwhile, Lipstick Jungle‘s cancellation still stings a bit. Earlier this year, I tuned in to its series premiere with only slightly higher expectations than I would have for Kath & Kim, and while it didn’t leave me with an unscratchable mental rash, when faced with no plans at 10 p.m on any given Wednesday, I found myself compelled to tune in.
I never bought the “next Sex & the City” billing; from the get go, Jungle was less charming and, despite its three characters’ arguably bigger fashion allowances, less glamorous. Wendy (Brooke Shields) is the president of a major movie production company and the married mother of two, Victory (Lindsay Price) a spunky fashion designer, Nico (Kim Raver) the Editor-In-Chief of the fictional Bonfire magazine. They’re all best friends, there for each other through thick and thin, which is great for everyone else in their lives, because these pals don’t just lean on each other; they heave, they crush, they smother. They are an unstoppable trifecta of misery.
Wendy seems to have awoken one morning to the cruel realization that she has children who requiring parenting and a husband with career aspirations of his own. Victory is struggling to get her first clothing line off the ground (a plot point confused by her massive uptown apartment, which puts that of her far more successful– and far more stylish– would-be doppelganger Carrie Bradshaw to shame) while juggling incompetent assistants and pesky suitors. And Nico is battling the tedium of a seemingly perfect marriage and a high-powered editorial job that apparently requires nothing more than her attendance at a mind-blowingly efficient once-weekly meeting and allows her to gab with friends and conduct other personal business out of her plush corner office.
At one point, Nico learns that a male co-worker is vying for a higher-up position that she also covets (inexplicably, as it runs the risk of upping her workload from nonexistent to slight), so she summarily edges him out of his job entirely by convincing him the company is tanking. That one of Lipstick Jungle‘s primary characters works at a magazine publishing company wherein employees must be tricked into fearing for their job security indicates just how firm of a grasp the show has on reality.
Still, it was fun while it lasted– mostly because I, rooted in the terra firma of actual life, occasionally enjoy being reminded that even my higher-up working-girl counterparts have shit days, too. Lots of them, actually. Lots and lots of shit days. Most of which were brought on by their own choices. Their own bad choices. Like Victory leasing the floorspace for her first store from her billionaire ex-boyfriend. Like Wendy forging a insurance paperwork to allow an actor friend to work on his John Lennon biopic opus despite the brain tumor ravaging his brain. Like Nico cheating on her husband– who would eventually cheat on her, but hadn’t yet– with a photographer half her age.
I felt like I was meant to root for the ladies, but I mostly just gloated. Was I supposed to believe that they shouldn’t have known better, that these were choices I was meant to sympathize– if not empathize– with? Am I alone in this confusion? Was Lipstick Jungle‘s self-righteous self-indulgence intentional, or an unfortunate tonal misfire? And is that what lead to its ultimate demise? I can’t say for sure, of course. Either way, it probably didn’t help.
Weeks before its cancellation and Kath & Kim’s extension I started and stopped a few blog posts wondering which show would be more successful in America’s new economic environment: The one about the women living upper-upper-middle-class lives, regardless of whether they could afford it, jetting off to Paris, pushing kids through private school, attempting to save their floundering marriages with collagen injections to the hoo-ha? Or the one about the women who spend their lives window-shopping, eating food court lunches, one freeloading, lusting over a fairy tale wedding and likely breaking her small, tacky bank to get it?
Neither are particularly flattering– not to mention accurate– portraits of American women, but for now, at least, the mallrats seem to have won.