Bushnell's 'Lipstick' doesn't measure up

If Candace Bushnell and Darren Star are going to have a feud, I think TV viewers would be better served if they just got together on the streets of New York and duked it out -- instead of throwing lousy, derivative shows at each other.

Hey, watch it there! Some innocent soul might stumble upon one of these programs and actually watch it.

Bushnell, of course, is the original columnist behind "Sex and the City," and Star is the writer-producer who turned it into such a premium-cable sensation on HBO. Since then, they've had a falling out -- maybe something to do with how Bushnell wanted Star to help convert her follow-up book, "Lipstick Jungle," into a series for NBC, and instead Star came up with his own startlingly similar show for ABC.

Star's "Cashmere Mafia," which debuted last month, concerns four fashionable, frisky, foxy and ferocious women who are nonetheless always there for each other as they try to make it in New York City. Bushnell's "Lipstick Jungle" debuts at 9 p.m. today on NBC's WMAQ Channel 5, and it concerns three fashionable, frisky, foxy and ferocious women who are nonetheless there for each other as they try to make it in New York City.

You know what they say about great minds: Sometimes they share a lot with plagiarists.

Word about these two series has been circulating since last spring, when they were both pegged for midseason debuts, and Your Friendly Neighborhood TV Critic is often asked, "Which one is better?"

Let me just say this is not a competition, so the notion of "better" or "best" really doesn't apply to these two shows. That clarified, I will add this: "Lipstick Jungle" is worse.

I know, I know, it's really not fair. It's Bushnell's baby, and there's no way the clone should be better than the original. Yet that's the case. For all its contrivances, "Cashmere" at least finds Star in control of a series and how to make it mildly amusing from week to week. It's alluring trash TV. "Lipstick," by contrast, is just mussed, clearly tampered with and watered down, as indicated by how four writers are credited -- including Bushnell -- on tonight's pilot.

The big problem, however, is in star Brooke Shields, who plays Manhattan movie mogul Wendy Healy. Now, I'm not going to mention "Suddenly Susan" or "Brenda Starr," much less "The Blue Lagoon," which is really ancient history, but I am going to insist that, in spite of any PR anyone might have read, she does not have the gravitas to act as a cutthroat film producer calmly playing chicken over the phone in contract negotiations with Leonardo DiCaprio -- certainly not to the roaring cheers of an office full of employees listening in. What, you don't think someone wouldn't leak that to Variety or People or Us or the National Enquirer, and that Leo wouldn't surely make her pay in the end?

Better is the cool and steely Kim Raver, from "24," as magazine editor Nico Reilly. Like Wendy, she's working under Julian Sand's media baron Hector Matrick, and get your mind out of the gutter: When I say "working under," I really mean "working under," not "working under," got it?

Now, when Robert Buckley's young stud Kirby follows Nico into a nightclub bathroom and quiets her halfhearted protests by saying, "Shhhh, you're sexy, stop talking," well, then you can put your mind back in the gutter, because it's only a matter of time before they're going to be working over -- and under -- each other.

"I don't do this," she says. "I'm married." So she settles for him scrawling his phone number on her inner thigh with an oh-so-very-Magic Marker. When her distant husband doesn't even notice it that night, however, what's a fashionable, frisky, foxy, ferocious woman (with a clear aversion to soap) to do when her skirt rides up on her in the cab the next day and there's the phone number singing to her?

Raver at least makes the fling seem real, even if the inevitable tears are a bit forced. Much worse is Lindsay Price, who plays fashion designer Victory Ford with all the blubbering self-confidence of a "Project Runaway" also-ran.

"I need a cupcake," she moans. What she gets instead is a Mr. Big stand-in in the form of Andrew McCarthy, yes, the Brat Pack milquetoast, who hasn't gotten any more substantial in middle age. Talk about watered down, he makes Chris Noth seem like a healthy pour of single-malt Scotch.

In any case, his Joe Bennett (Mr. Not Quite So Big) doesn't say much for Bushnell's ability to create new characters and situations. "Lipstick Jungle" just seems an inferior extension of "Sex and the City." So put aside any notion of good or better or best. Put it this way: It's even more derivative than "Cashmere Mafia."