Lipstick Jungle

In a fine display of my lack of self-control, I watched the pilot of NBC’s new series “Lipstick Jungle” last night. Since it’s the only original non-gameshow non-reality material they have right now, they’ve been promoting the living hell out of it. Literally every commercial break on NBC for the past month has included a Lipstick Jungle trailer. There’s also constantly been a little watermark in the corner of the screen advertising the series’ premiere on February 7.

From watching those trailers, I got the impression that Lipstick Jungle is basically “Sex and the City” (which I secretly enjoy a lot) with the following differences:

• There are three main characters, not four.
• The main characters do not have physical flaws.
• The focus of the show is how the main characters get ahead in life by slutting, not on their quests for ideal relationships.

As it turns out, the first two are true. The last one, however, is not.

Here’s the basic setup of the show: the three main characters are a film producer, a magazine editor, and a fashion designer. (Honest to God, I can’t remember their names — bad sign, eh? I think one of them starts with a B) The first two are married, and the third is single. The first one has a kid. The pilot opens with the announcement on the TV news that some magazine’s list of New York’s 50 most powerful women is out, and it turns out these three are on it. The show’s theme, as I gather, is the difficulties they have in their lives as a consequence of being so rich and powerful. For instance, the film producer and her husband get in a fight which starts because her awesome and powerful job leaves her too busy to do stuff like clean up when their cat barfs on the pillow.

I have to believe that whoever has creative control over the content of the show wasn’t responsible for creating the trailers. The trailers made me think that the show was intended to be a celebration of powerful women, and was going to fail miserably at it by sending a message that in order to be a powerful woman you need to be hot and you need to sleep with the right people. I think the intent really is to be partly a celebration of powerful women, but it fails in a completely different way from how I expected. The other part of the intent is to show that powerful women (I’m starting to get sick of that phrase) don’t have it easy. I suppose you could say the show succeeds at that, but it fails to stir up any sympathy in me. Not because of the content of the message, but because of how it’s delivered.

It seems to me like the show is really more of a straight-up drama than a comedy-drama as advertised. I was surprised at the seriousness of it. I expected it to be similar to SatC in tone (I mean, come on, they advertise “from the writer of ‘Sex and the City’” as a feature in the trailers), but it’s actually significantly darker. It is also not funny in the slightest, although it tries to be. I think they tried to counterbalance the rather serious drama side of the show with some humor, but neither the writers nor the actors can pull off humor.

They try another antidote to the drama, the old standby: the heartwarming moment of unshakeable friendship. The pilot ends with the three main characters standing on a roof (don’t ask me why) drinking champagne and celebrating the fact that their lives are all headed towards various forks of Shit Creek. One of them is in a fight with her husband, another one is cheating on her husband, and the other one had a couple bad days at work. It gets painfully corny before the show finally ends. See, SatC could pull that off because it took joy in its own corniness. The characters always spoke naturally (I believe somebody unironically used the word “devastatingly” on LJ) and in fact it seemed like Sarah Jessica Parker was reveling in the ridiculousness of her own narration voiceovers. This is what made SatC seem like a “smart” show. It offered real insights while at the same time gently poking fun at its own method of delivering them. LJ is just trying too hard.

Anyway, I have two severe beefs (beeves?) with the show. The first is that the acting (and the writing, to a slightly lesser extent) is absolutely God-awful. That might be because this was the pilot and the actors hadn’t connected with their characters or each other yet, but I’d expect professional actors in a heavily-promoted primetime show to do better than this in any situation. It seems like none of them knows how to deliver lines like a real person. I kept wanting to yell out, “Nobody talks like that!” Even the fashion designer’s fake crying is laughable. I don’t know if one causes the other, but a related complaint I have is that the characters (not just the main ones) seem to have a tendency to describe each other to each other. You’ll have one character saying to another, “She’s very powerful and successful,” in reference to someone who’s not even there. Aside from that being something no real person would say in casual conversation, that is a terrible way to do character development. You’re supposed to let the character’s actions, and interactions with others, do the talking. Have them do things that demonstrate their power and success. Taken to this extreme, it feels like an insult to my intelligence.

I suppose it doesn’t help that, like I mentioned, none of the three lead actors seem to have physical flaws. That was part of what helped viewers connect with the main characters of SatC: they’re obviously not perfect-looking, but that’s a good thing because no real human being is perfect-looking. The characters on LJ are portrayed as basically able to have any man they want — they are immune to that class of relationship problems because they’re above such trials and tribulations. Their problem isn’t that they have trouble finding romance — it’s that they sometimes have too much of it, or that they’re just too darn busy for that kind of thing.

All that is related to my other beef: the constant, overpowering, obnoxious way the show rubs its message in your face. It’s understandable that the actors don’t seem to talk like real people if they have to go to such great lengths to make sure viewers don’t miss the point of the show. If you’re given lines that aren’t remotely like what a real person would say, there’s not a whole lot you can do. It may be because it’s just the pilot (though I don’t like using that as an excuse), but the writers seemed to be going well out of their way to say, very thinly veiled, that “women can be powerful too” and “powerful women don’t have it easy”. I’m all for gender equality, but I don’t like being punched in the head with it. This severe overdoing of the message is partly responsible for my lack of sympathy with the characters. The “don’t think we have it easy because we’re so rich and powerful” is so overplayed that it ends up seeming like they’re just whining: “oh woe is me I am sooo busy but somehow not too busy to apply all this makeup every day”.

I might keep watching for another episode or two, since it’s possible that some of these things are wrong with it only because it’s the pilot. I also have a tendency to waste my time watching really dumb TV shows (“Deal or No Deal”, anyone?). All in all, Lipstick Jungle rubs me the wrong way. I can’t say I recommend it.