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Season One of Lipstick Jungle has, unfortunately, come to DVD.

When Candace Bushnell’s novel Four Blondes came out in hardcover, I went to see her on the Dallas leg of her signing tour. The second season of Sex and the City and the aforementioned novel clutched in my fangirl hands, I staked out my seat early and waited for hours for the woman who created Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha to take the podium and dazzle me. What happened was something I was completely unprepared for; after only a few minutes of speaking, Ms. Bushnell turned on the audience, informing us that we were illiterate and only cared for a stupid television show that watered down her brainchild in order to make it accessible to idiotic American audiences.

I was shocked. I was stunned and offended. I still managed to be a fan of Sex and the City, but I never read another of her novels, and wrote off Candice Bushnell all together. It is, perhaps, the reason why I didn’t watch Lipstick Jungle when it first aired – I didn’t have an invested relationship with the main characters like I did Sex’s fab four. Watching the complete first season on DVD gave me a whole new appreciation for my grudge against the authoress.

The comparisons with Sex and the City are unavoidable – the show was clearly developed to milk a little more out of the Carrie Bradshaw cash cow. The thing of it is, where Sex has lovable characters with understandable foibles, Lipstick Jungle just has characters.

Brooke Shields plays Wendy, a movie executive whose motives and feelings are wishy-washy to the extreme. She is a mess, and the idea of a woman like her reaching a position of such power and importance is laughable. On occasion she whips out her ‘big gun’ attitude, and conducts herself in a way that I imagine a real studio exec must be every day – hard, smart and clever. These moments are few and far between.

Wendy’s main plot is the struggle to be mother and successful businesswoman, to try to be the best without alienating her husband (played by the ever delicious Paul Blackthorne of The Dresden Files) and children. I found myself constantly wanting to reach through the screen and slap her. When Brooke Shields cries, she is utterly unconvincing - maybe she should go off the anti-depressants. Her character is stupidly deluded, more so than Shields herself accepting Tom Cruise’s friendship as something other than a PR stunt.

Kim Raver plays the magazine titan Nico, a woman so obsessed with feminism that she becomes a cliché and worse, actually sexually harasses an employee. The show tries to pass this off as a love affair gone wrong, but I was utterly appalled and sickened by her plot, not to mention the feminist tripe that poured out of her mouth at every available moment. They gave her sex scenes that lacked the plot-filled, point-making goodness of Sex and strayed into useless Desperate Housewives territory. She also had a habit of letting her tongue loll along her upper lip in a completely un-sexy (I’d go so far as to say gross) way.

Victory, played by Lindsay Price, was the only character I found believable and actually likable. A fashion designer struggling to come back from two bad season’s worth of reviews, Victory is pretty and feminine; like the other two she has feminist ideals but only sticks to them when it’s appropriate to do so. Her love interest, Joe Bennett (played by Andrew McCarthy, who I don’t buy as a romantic lead with all of Mr. Big’s money – perhaps the producers thought he could ride the wave of 80’s nostalgia ala Patrick Dempsey), occasionally swoops in to rescue her with romantic gestures that she knows she shouldn’t enjoy, yet does. She is unapologetic about her character, and it suits her. Unlike the other two bitchy harpies, she has nothing to apologize for.

The cast is rounded out with a great collection of actors – the always wonderful Julian Sands is great to see (in something not called Warlock), Robert Buckley as the tantalizingly hot Kirby (I suspect he’ll be a household name someday soon), and even Lorraine Braco, looking swollen and angry, makes a guest appearance.  But the actors can’t even compare with the guest designers on the show – the wardrobe department acts as a who’s who of the fashion industry.

After watching the mind boggling seven season one episodes, I could only surmise that the aim of the show is to prove that women are equal to men in all ways, but it really only proved that women are equal in how disgusting and amoral they can be – and that’s a fact that didn’t really need proving. If there is a point other than that, it is completely buried under the heavy pile of fecal matter that is the script.

The bonus features are slim pickings. There are a few deleted scenes (and one can easily see why they were deleted; they are either utterly useless, or they manage a feat that I thought impossible – they make the characters even more unlikable. Combine that with a handful of previews, and that’s all she wrote.

Sadly, Lipstick Jungle made the cut for a new fall season, and considering all the shows we’ve seen come and go through recent years, it’s a tragedy. Perhaps if Firefly or Wonderfalls had been on NBC and Lipstick Jungle on Fox, all would be right with the world. Until then, I’ll spend my Wednesday nights watching my cat vomit – it’ll be more rewarding.

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