Lipstick Jungle

The show itself is so poorly conceived that you can only pity the viewer who gets lost in this Jungle.

It's nearly a certainty that someone will call Lipstick Jungle, NBC's new drama series about sensual and successful women, a "guilty pleasure," but it's really more of a guilty horror.

Lipstick Jungle wrongheadedly wants to have it both ways--to celebrate and explore the lives and loves of women at the top through protagonists who don't have the drive or the depth to make it there.

What the obnoxious "Cashmere Mafia" and now the dull Lipstick Jungle suggest is that it's not as easy to recreate the "Sex and the City" phenomenon as assembling three or four attractive actresses of a certain age and pairing them with a name producer from the HBO show.

Lipstick Jungle is a wooden clog of a melodrama squeezed into a flimsy, satin and marabou mule.

Lipstick Jungle is a strangely dour affair--its shadowy, chilly depiction of New York fits right alongside the NBC house style of Law & Order--and is almost misshapen in its clunky blend of drama and comedy.

Please say this is entertainment--and nothing more. That might not make it all right, but it would restore a whole lot of faith.

No matter how horrible the clichés or gorgeous the gowns, they can't distract from the androphobic virulence at the heart of Lipstick Jungle.

Which "Sex and the City" knockoff is worse, ABC's "Cashmere Mafia" or NBC's Lipstick Jungle (based on Sex author Candace Bushnell's best-seller)? It really depends which one you're watching at the time. Both are simply dreadful, failing miserably at making their glamorously high-powered heroines sympathetic, credible or remotely interesting.

Better to wait for the big-screen movie of "Sex and the City," arriving May 30.

It's all the same stuff--magazine parties, feckless husbands, tempting male bimbos...but without "Cashmere Mafia's" redeeming air of farce.

NBC's superficial knockoff is just Lipstick on a pig.