Yesterday, I talked about what shows I was overjoyed to see banished from the idiot box.
Today, I’m mourning fallen shows that, to varying degrees, were interesting for women. Unfortunately, this list is a lot longer:
The L Word (Showtime). I’m actually impressed that The L Word made it as long as it did. The show was a wonderful exploration of the mania of living in a community bound by a life of otherness. And it did so without being preachy. The final two seasons moved away from this exploration in favor of scandalous hook-ups, which proved to be the show’s ultimate undoing. The series’ finale, “Last Word,” was more a manic surrender than anything else.
Lipstick Jungle (NBC): I’ve said it here before: it’s tough to make a show that needs to capitalize on the Sex and the City void to be successful when you have to censor the gratuitous sex and swearing to squeak it through network approval. After just two seasons, Lipstick Jungle finally lost the fight. It turns out that women’s problems that aren’t solved by Jimmy Choo’s aren’t as commercially viable, which is a sad social comment.
Privileged (CW). Privileged might have made it on a different network, but it’s not right for the CW’s demographic, who tune into Gossip Girl, America’s Next Top Model, and 90210. The quarter-life crisis of a Yale graduate just didn’t fit in the line-up. It’s a pity, Megan (Joanna Garcia) was one of the most relatable characters on television for the twenty-something crowd that, like this author, hasn’t quite realized their ambitions for what they want to be when they grow up.
The Starter Wife (USA). This cancellation might be one of the saddest, if only for the realization that, when the boys make fun of the more ridiculous qualities of Hollywood on Entourage, it’s a blockbuster, but when the girls do it on The Starter Wife, it gets cancelled. Plus, I’m a sucker for Debra Messing, and think it’s sad that she’ll probably never find a post-Will and Grace home.
The Unusuals (ABC). This show not finding a following is one of those things that make me think I’m hopelessly out of touch with popular reality. The show was packed with talent like Amber Tamblyn (Gilmore Girls and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), Harrold Perrineau (LOST), and Adam Goldberg (Entourage and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days). The script had a Seinfeld-esque quirkishness that made you laugh, shake your head, and see bits of yourself and your friends in everyone on the screen.
So long, friends! It is with a heavy heart that I delete you from the DVR prioritizer.
Showing posts with label Lipstick Jungle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lipstick Jungle. Show all posts
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
