Hallmark (and shoes!) Be Damned!

Lipstick Jungle certainly came back from the break with a bite (say that three times fast). “Lover’s Leaps,” aired on January 2, 2009, took on relationships (of the meaningful non-one night stand variety) from an angle that other series inspired by a Candace Bushnell novel never quite managed: if the essence of relationships is compromise, where do we factor in the kind of ambition that, if it’s ever to go anywhere, has to be unyielding?

Let’s be clear: I’m really disappointed that Nico (Kim Raver), the most successful one in the bunch, seems to yet again be winding up hitched to an authority figure--the only one she has left, in fact, a very suave Griffin (James Lesure), who runs a multi-billion dollar company but mysteriously has time to babysit Nico when she has a bad reaction to her fertility treatments. We don’t need more media images that women, even highly successful ones, require romantic attachments to male mentors to keep their feet on the ground.

Luckily, “Lover’s Leaps” is about more than office romances and glass ceilings. And it’s even more than American feminism’s elephant in the room: if career advancement comes from wholehearted selfishness (which, let’s face it, it usually does) and relationships succeed through deciding what’s best for a duo, how on earth can you have both? Instead, this episode focuses on the rider that elephant has acquired in the last decade, known as the “two (or more) bodies problem”: in a career playing field that in most cases is continuing to grow wider geographically, how do you stay with “the one”?

The question is asked in the context of the marriage of Wendy (Brooke Shields) and Shane (Paul Blackthorne). The latest drama in the Healy household is the looming offer for Shane, whose career usually takes a backseat to Wendy’s, to join Natasha Bedingfield on a four-month tour of thirty cities. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity that anyone would regret and resent giving up. And yet it’s going to thrust one-hundred percent of the responsibility to keep the family running on Wendy, who will in turn wind up with plenty of regret and resentment of her own.

I love that the show runs from the Hallmark moment where Shane decides to give up his dreams and pretends that the family always more than compensates for the loss in favor of letting him take his shot. And I love that the writers have set it up that we don’t believe for a second that there isn’t going to be some serious mid-life crisis drama in Shane’s notes from the road. And what I really love is how Wendy making more money than Shane didn’t fix everything in Wendy’s life. Sex and the City upheld the mantra that unbridled consumerism and an unlimited shoe budget would fix any woman’s life, and I for one, am glad that even Candace Bushnell appears to have begun to appreciate multiple layers of conflict.