I Like to Watch

Ladies who power-lunch
Speaking of rich, powerful boss ladies, I was relieved to discover that, although NBC's "Lipstick Jungle" is just as fluffy and soapy as you'd imagine a show based on a book by Candace Bushnell should be, it's still far smarter and more appealing than ABC's rich-and-powerful-lady fluff-fest "Cashmere Mafia."

Where "Cashmere Mafia" is pert and cutesy, "Lipstick Jungle" (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, on NBC) is reasonably snappy and substantive. Brooke Shields, Kim Raver and Lindsay Price are all well cast as women who wield power convincingly, and the show doesn't reduce its confident leads to giggling, insecure teenagers like so many other female-dominated dramas do. Sure, there are a few scenes where Nico (Raver) is rendered breathless and googly-eyed by a younger suitor, but her struggle to justify her behavior and hide the truth from her close friends is treated with the weight that it deserves.

Even Victory (Price), who's being romanced by billionaire Joe (played by Andrew McCarthy), doesn't giggle and "aw shucks" her way through her lines, nor does she moon over Joe and his money. She's much too preoccupied by her stalling career as a fashion designer, so she sweetly but firmly makes it clear to Joe that she doesn't have lots of time to fly around on his private jet, eating snow crabs and sampling cured meats. (Hey Joe, Patti Stanger has a pretty selection of ass magnets who don't have inconvenient "careers" or "hobbies" that might stand in the way of your good time.)

"Lipstick Jungle" isn't perfect, but the dialogue is sharp and funny, and for once, we're given female characters who don't sacrifice their dignity or personal power for the sake of another lovable, goofy story line that's guaranteed not to intimidate female viewers. These women are making tough choices, they're good friends to each other, and they feel fairly genuine in the show's first two episodes. Here's hoping the show's producers will stick to their guns (even if their overbearing network bosses disagree) and stay committed to these unapologetically strong female characters.

Island living
Meanwhile, I sort of wish the overbearing network bosses at ABC would give some explicit, detailed instructions to the masterminds at "Lost" (9 p.m. Thursdays on ABC), something along the lines of "We can't spend another season stuck on that damn island trying to figure out who's good and who's bad, so don't try to make us!"

Here's my beef. (Spoiler alert: If you missed last Thursday's premiere of "Lost," don't read this.) The castaways are about to get rescued. There's a helicopter and everything. Why not stick with that mood, have everybody hug and cry, get some people on the damn helicopter and have it fly off? Maybe the rest of the castaways have to wait until the helicopter comes back. Eventually, when no helicopter returns, the castaways who were left behind might start to wonder if the rescuers were eeevil, plus they'd get the news of Charlie and freak out. Maybe the castaways on the helicopter are given some explanation as to why they'll return home without the others. But they go home, there's a parade, they try to enjoy it all. Of course there are questions looming, plus some mysterious circumstances ...

I don't have it all mapped out. All I'm saying is that, with a rescue, the writers had an opportunity to do something new. Let's see everyone get excited and stay excited for one episode. Of course one or two characters are suspicious of the whole thing, to keep up the suspense. But let's see a few of the castaways happily take a helicopter home; let's see some of them rejoining society and feeling relieved about it for half a minute.

Yes, there are the flash forwards, but they might as well be flashbacks, because they're just as isolated and magical. Charlie appears to Hugo with ominous warnings. Doesn't that scene feel like a "Lost" Mad Lib? "[Character name] who is actually [adjective] appears to [character name] as [opposite of adjective] and says, 'You have to [verb] before [character name] is [past tense verb]!'"

Instead, what do you know? The helicopter doesn't land anywhere but drops someone off in a parachute, and now we've got Henry Gale (or Michael or Ana Lucia or Locke) all over again. Is he good or is he eeeeevil? Let's hold a gun to his head/torture him/befriend him/ask him questions/put him in a pit in the ground/lock him up and find out!

Obviously some of the castaways are going to make it off the island eventually; maybe it'll even happen soon. But we need to have some new experiences and stray away from this dominant, ominous mood in every single scene. There have been episodes that were relatively light in the past. It's not like there can't be trouble brewing when some of the castaways are excited to leave. Must they all mourn Charlie together, when there's a helicopter on the way? Must they all struggle with whether to join Locke or not? Can't one among them be as self-interested as Michael? In the first two seasons, all of the castaways had a lot of flaws. Now it seems like they're all valiant heroes, each more courageous than the last, one-upping each other with one act of self-sacrifice after another.

And enough with the visions and the magic! They don't propel this story forward anymore. We know by now that these visions rarely add up or come back into play, so we don't trust them or take them as anything but "Now the scene gets really spooky!"

This perspective won't come as a surprise to those of you who gave up on "Lost" long ago (who will chime in on letters to remind us just how long ago you knew that "Lost" was a lost cause) or to those of you who love "Lost" with a passion and find an intricate, interrelated web of meaning in every little detail, but personally, I don't see how the writers could take a rescue and make it feel like something that's already happened on the show before.

Don't forget to boss
I do want to add that mapping out the right path for "Lost" is a seriously difficult undertaking, one that's a world apart from doing the paint-by-numbers plotting of a procedural drama or even a nighttime soap. The show's writers are in uncharted territory -- or they will be whenever they go back to work. It's not really their fault that they're writing the same scenes that they've written before, any more than it's our fault that we're so lumpy, sullen and slovenly after so many years on the earth, or that we expect to extract so much promise and meaning from our TV sets. Let's face it, we all need new bosses, bosses who'll bossily boss us around until we come close to resembling those capable, industrious human beings who walked the earth 200 years ago.

Next week ... Fanboys join the fray on "Survivor," while "The L Word" fumbles but doesn't drop the soap!