First we had Sex and the City. Women friends who talk about sex over brunch.
In the fall we got Womens Murder Club (ABC). Women friends who talk about relationships and solve mysteries over brunch.
Coming this year: Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia are both about powerful executive women who talk about work and relationships over brunch.
Lipstick Jungle (premiering Feb 7th on NBC) and Cashmere Mafia (premiers Jan 6 on ABC) both have great clothes and four inch heels, but Lipstick Jungle looks to be the more original since it only features three women — two of whom are brunettes. And there isn’t a red head in sight.
In this new wave of girl gang shows, the friendship between the women is the all important part.
Sort of.
Because these are romance shows too. But in order to make the friendships between the women the focus of the shows, the romances can’t work out too well. WMC’s Lindsay is in love with her ex who is getting remarried. And in the fourth acts of the pilots for both Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia, the leads get dumped by the men they love.
At least they count on their friends.
The good news is that the women in the girl gang shows are smart. The Women’s Murder Club gals solve crimes. The women in Cashmere Mafia are described as having Ivy League educations. And the Lipstick ladies are all amongst the most powerful women in New York.
But smart women — as we all know — are not good with men. Hence all the time they need to spend eating chocolate, swilling martinis and discussing their love lives.
Let’s take a quick look at how the girl gang series work.
Each seems to have a lead — WMC’s Inspector Lindsay Boxer (Angie Harmon); S&theC’s Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), CM’s Mia Mason (Lucy Liu) and LJ’s Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields). Even the four fabulous women of G-Spot, another girl gang show, were led by Gigi (Brigette Bako).
The lead woman takes more screen time and is single and thus available for romance.
The women in new shows represent all the permutations and combinations of love life possibilities. In S & the C, all the women were single, but in WMC one is divorced, one married, one engaged and one single and looking. In LJ, Wendy’s husband leaves her in the pilot, making her separated with kids. Married Nico starts an affair with a younger man. And Victory is single and dating a billionaire.
CM goes one better by having Caitlin considering a lesbian relationship (G-Spot added a genuine card-carrying lesbian in the second season). Two of the Cashmere women are married with kids — Zoe struggles to keep the love alive; Juliet puts up with her husband’s affairs. Mia is dumped by her boyfriend in the pilot. These women have work issues too. Caitlin is considering it with a woman who works under her. Mia is given a promotion to a position of huge responsibility and Zoe is being threatened by a younger woman on the rise.
In WMC, every episode includes a single murder solved collectively by the four women. The B-story is about the love life of one or another of the characters. The C involves another love life or one of the women’s personal relationship with a witness or someone else involved in the murder.
In Lipstick Jungle, we follow each of the three women through her own story line that focuses on how she balances work and home life. And even though things don’t go well in either the business end or the romance side, they get together periodically through the episode to report to each other and again at the end to bolster each other’s egos.
In Cashmere Mafia each of the four women has her own story line but they come together to vanquish each other’s foes and help each other succeed. In the pilot, Mia is pitted against her boyfriend in a race to win a client’s business. Her friends help her to wine and dine him by getting her a table at the best restaurant and courtside basketball seats. And when Zoe sees Juliet’s husband kissing another woman, Zoe, Mia and Caitlin find time in their busy schedules to be together when they tell her. And in the end, they conspire to keep the other woman from buying the condo she craves and getting a table at their favourite restaurant.
Blackberries, great clothes and lots of talk about romance are important parts of LJ and CM. WMC has murder mysteries instead. All have the message that when women come together there is great power.
WMC seems to be getting good numbers on Friday nights.
I think Cashmere Mafia has the goods to be a contender too. They have Darren Starr to exec produce and Patricia Field doing wardrobe — both of Sex in the City fame. Also CM has a really strong theme as stated at 27:30 of the pilot:
Look at what a man gives up to be with one of us. We make more money. We rise higher. We take up more space. We are as far from the idea of a wife that he grew up with as it is possible to be and still wear his ring and go by his last name.
The big question is whether there are enough scripts in the bank for the series to get any traction during the strike.