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.