Lipstick Jungle: Season 1 - Review
Review by Jack Foley
LIPSTICK Jungle is a Sex & The City-style show that’s notable for having been penned by the same author, Candace Bushnell.
It’s got glamour, glitz and plenty of sex appeal… and is, once again, set in New York. But while Sex & The City focused on the complicated lives of four single women, Lipstick Jungle features three high-powered women – two of whom have husbands in tow.
It is, by turns, fun and frivolous, yet frequently poorly written and irritating. The women themselves lack the ruthless streaks needed to really make them convincing as successful business ladies, while the men mostly conform to the wish fulfilment fantasies of any hopeless romantic female viewer.
That said, on the plus side Kim Raver (aka Jack Bauer’s love interest in 24) is arguably the pick of the cast members as Nico Reilly, a publishing exec attempting to juggle the demands of her career with an affair with a younger man (Robert Buckley’s Kirby).
While Brooke Shields demonstrates some assured comedic touches as studio boss Wendy Healy, who must mix being a mother and devoted wife with the pressures of the film world and a temperamental husband (Paul Blackthorne), who is finding it difficult to cope with his stay-at-home status.
The final member of the trio, however, is Lindsay Price’s overly irritating fashion designer Victory Ford, who must contend with a failing business and an impossibly rich boyfriend (Andrew McCarthy’s Joe Bennet). It’s Price’s overly neurotic character who hits the most dud notes, swinging hysterically from one hissy fit to the next and emerging as one of the more unappealing characters to emerge from the small screen this year.
Poor, too, is the superficiality of proceedings, with the success of most relationships apparently being measured by how often and how good the sexual experience of each partner. In this regard, too, Raver’s Nico fares badly… flitting wildly between carefree and loving it, to guilty and domineering.
Shields’ Wendy, meanwhile, was often a little too prone to meddling in her husband’s affairs and being strong one minute, and wracked with guilt and self-doubt the next.
The seven episodes that comprise the first season do zip by, however, and there’s a certain amount of fun to be had in watching events unfold – especially when the writers put the trio at each other’s throats as they look to judge each other’s indiscretions.
A trip to Scotland, in particular, involved a memorable fall-out between Nico and Wendy that offered one of the better, more biting examples of the script at its best – even though the inevitable patch-up arrived a little too quickly and deprived the season of any lasting complexity.
Lipstick Jungle, which screened exclusively on Living TV, is therefore an entertaining diversion (especially for Monday nights) that does, in fact, improve into its second season. It’s well worth becoming acquainted with these ladies, even though the spectre of the axe currently hangs over them.
Like it’s title suggests, it’s all gloss… but a proper guilty pleasure dose of it all the same.
Certificate: 15
Episodes: 7
UK DVD Release: December 26, 2008