So Lipstick Jungle debuts tonight, making it the second Sex and the City knock-off to appear is this strike-addled season. To be fair, Jungle is at least a knock-off by Sex creator Candace Bushnell (who appears to support the Joe Bob Briggs axiom that if you’re going to remake a movie, then remake the movie).

On the surface, the greatest difference between the programs would be that one has four women and one has three women. Jungle has played up the sex factor in their advertising; seriously, Kim Raver’s been on Third Watch, The Nine, and 24 and I don’t recall that I’ve ever seen as much of her breasts as I do in the picture above. Also, if you consider the way that the women are draped on each other, they’re clearly shooting for a male audience on the subliminal “chicks with chicks” level. Mafia, for its part, comes off in commercials as cold and stuffy. Or maybe that’s just Lucy Liu.

In theory, Jungle probably has the advantage. The three leads are more commonly known to the TV audience, and actress/singer Lindsay Price (still “Janet from 90210″ to many) is underrated. Still, the whole approach speaks less to the level of synergistic ideaspace and more toward “Hey, the other guys are doing S&TC-lite, so we need to, too!”

I am not weighing in on the critical merits of either show. That’s not my point. My point is that in the days of strikes and dwindling audiences, network TV keeps turning back to iterations of the same idea and wondering why they’re bleeding viewers. This season alone, even the shows that built fanbases have been largely drawn from very obvious inspirations. That Moonlight=Angel requires no rocket science, but even the entertaining Chuck is merely a clever gestalt of Alias, hip referencing, and a hundred “geek mistaken for spy” films.

In my estimation, we’re left with only a handful of really original shows. Most of those are on FX, HBO or Showtime. After that? Lost, obviously, but then the curve dives for the rest of network. Heroes is great fun, but it’s at heart a comics-greatest-hits album.

My hope is that the strike will actually serve to re-energize the TV writing community. After weeks of not working, I hope that they roar back with new ideas, new takes on old formulai, and a willingness to break with some dinosaurish traditions (someone please kill the damn laugh track for good).

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Shotgun Reviews (The Column), Television, Troy Brownfield. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.