Sex and the City Minus Sex Equals...?

When TBS started re-running the HBO hit Sex and the City, I thought that I would finally be able to get my fixes without buying the very expensive seasons on DVD. Wrong. Once you scrubbed down the episodes to make them acceptable for non-premium channels and squeezed commercials into their still hour-long slot, there just wasn’t much left.

As a result, I was admittedly skeptical of NBC’s Lipstick Jungle. The adventures of magazine editor Nico (Kim Raver), studio executive Wendy (Brooke Shields), and fashion designer Victory (Lindsay Ford), three of “New York’s 50 Most Powerful Women,” sounded like the famous foursome with more power and less sex. And let’s face it, no one watched Sex and the City for Miranda (Cynthia Nixon)’s lawyering.

But it appears that Lipstick Jungle has done the impossible: it has made corporate America interesting… sexy, even. And it has done so while keeping in touch with issues that matter to working women: even the very powerful, high-paid ones.

Both Nico and Wendy experience the famous “double-shift”—more responsibility at work without lessening of responsibility at home—in different ways. Nico married one of her professors when she was in her twenties. When she later started succeeding professionally, he got bored and knocked up one of his current students, which Nico learns about while he’s on the operating table for his heart. In “Pandora’s Box,” aired September 24, he dies on the table, and as Nico is going through his affairs, she learns that he has been building a case against her for abandonment (even while he was putting the student up in a love-nest), which if it had been successful would have required Nico to pay him alimony after they divorced. And Nico’s been feeling bad about succumbing to an affair because of his distance!

So now we have a pregnant twenty-something (Megan – Shannon McGinnis) who’s about to lose everything. And we hate her for how nasty she was to Nico just before her husband’s death. In “Help!,” aired October 2, Megan re-emerges and demands financial support—before her lover/Nico’s husband’s affairs are even close to being settled. Nico lets her have it, lawyers, security and all—and we love her for it! How many times do the chips fall to give the jilted wife the upper hand? But as the episode progresses, she starts remembering what it was like being taken in by someone you idolized. In a truly magnanimous move, she decides not to take her anger out on Megan, giving her enough money to cover her expenses and establishing a generous trust for the baby. When Megan asks why she so suddenly changed her mind, Nico responds, “Because I remember what it’s like to be twenty-two.” There’s being a good sister to your fellow woman, and then there’s being the patron saint for developing young women. Guess which one Nico just became?

Wendy actually has children, so she fits the model for the double-shift a little more closely. Problems at home lead her to try to spend more time at home with her children in “Pandora’s Box,” a move that is complicated when her mother Joyce (guest star Mary Tyler Moore) comes to the city. Wendy later finds out that Joyce was interviewing for a job. When Wendy wants to know why on earth her sixty-something mother would want to come out of retirement from her upper-class life in the suburbs, Joyce talks about having to scale back at the height of her career—because of her children. In retirement, the “what might have been” questions have been haunting her.

Wendy’s maternal sensibilities prove to be the ultimate liability in her job. In “Help!,” she learns that the star of her new film biography on John Lennon, Noah Mason (Noah Bean) has a terminal brain tumor. Noah’s a dear friend, and she decides to make it possible for him to play John Lennon (something he’s always wanted to do) by forging a doctor’s signature to his physical form. In October 8’s “Let It Be,” Noah dies during production. When the higher-ups learn of the forgery, they assume it was Noah himself and threaten to go after his estate to recuperate lost production costs. Wendy decides that she can’t let that happen and comes clean, an act of supreme decency that’s rewarded with a firing.

And then there’s Victory. Victory’s company was recently purchased by her billionaire ex-boyfriend Joe Bennett (Andrew McCarthy). Joe wants Victory back, and is determined to do so by keeping her in debt to him. It’s the dependency marriage on a scale of millions of dollars. But the ever defiant Victory starts to date her contractor Rodrigo (Carlos Ponce), a move that sends her publicist, Dahlia (Rosie Perez), into the stratosphere—she doesn’t think Victory can sell high-end clothes with a low-rent boyfriend. At the moment Victory is the least interesting character on the show—she’s Samantha (Kim Cattrall), whose character loses the most when you take the sex down a notch.

Lipstick Jungle’s greatest virtue is that despite their insane amounts of money and power, the characters are grounded, and they’re grounded as women.