KEY POINTS:
In the fight to inherit Sex and the City's crown, the overdressed contenders seem to have forgotten the essential ingredients in the hit show about four fashionable gal pals doing it for themselves in Manhattan. It was fresh and funny.
You can get away with being as insubstantial as a pair of strappy little Manolos, if you have originality and good one-liners.
Lipstick Jungle (TV3, 9.30pm), a dramedy about three high-flying women friends in New York, comes hot on the heels of the dire Cashmere Mafia, a cancelled dramedy about four power-dame pals in the same city.
After last night's debut episode, it looks as if Lipstick Jungle is the better of the pair, but not by much. There's no getting away from the fact that the territory is a hopelessly shallow pool, even if its trio of stars are shod in the obligatory shoes ten miles high.
Like SATC, Lipstick Jungle is based on a novel by chic-chick-lit queen Candace Bushnell. Unfortunately, this show wants to prove that the gal pals who want more than just having it all can also grow up.
Think SATC, the earnest version, lecturing us as to why it's so difficult to be successful and a good mommy too, even when you can afford to put your offspring in expensive private schools, where presumably they will grow up to be just like the kids on Gossip Girl.
Lipstick Jungle tries hard to earn some cred by showing its characters' lives might be the stuff of fantasy but are less than perfect. Two of the trio are struggling with their marriages and the single girl's fashion designing career has just gone down the gurgler.
Yet what little jungle there is is entirely unbelievable. Just as the SATC women seemed barely ruffled by their supposedly demanding careers, the Lipstick trio have endless time on their hands to dissect their lives while strolling around town, over lunch or drinks in chic bars or on the panoramic balconies of their stunningly appointed apartments.
What saves it from being complete tosh are two of its stars. Brooke Shields is charming as the insecure Wendy, even though she seems rather bewildered by a role that calls for her to play a top movie exec as a complete ditz.
Kim Raver (the compelling Audrey Raines in 24) infuses her role with an intelligence that makes it almost feasible that she is a top magazine editor (Nico Reilly), although she is handicapped by getting the most pompous lines: "When they smell fear in this town, it's over!"
The weakest link is Victory Ford (Lindsay Price, a graduate of Beverly Hills 90210), an infantile being with a taste for comfort in the form of cupcakes and a sugar-daddy, whom one US wit, in reference to SATC's Mr Big, has dubbed "Mr Small".
None of them is helped with lines which no amount of cosmetic wizardry can gloss over: "I'm way too close to my product, but I don't know how to be any other way!"
To amend that boast beloved by a US power dame du jour, vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin: this show, I fear, is lipstick on a dog.
