• Network: NBC
  • Series Premiere Date: Feb 7, 2008
  • Season #: 1 , 2
Metascore
40 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 27 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 27
  2. Negative: 14 out of 27
  1. This is a high gloss, prime-time soap but it's a tad too earnest.
  2. 75
    t's not perfect. A few situations and lines are hyped-up "Sex and the City" moments, like when a distraught Lipsticker complains, "I need a cupcake." But if you can moan your way through such moments, the show gets more serious as it goes.
  3. Lipstick Jungle has some good things going for it, including actresses in roles that call for slightly more maturity than we're accustomed to, and juicy enough meanies to give it a little suspense.
  4. 70
    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."
  5. 63
    All three actresses deserve better dialogue than they are given. But the clothes? They speak volumes.
  6. What keeps Jungle from being laughably bad is Shields is so charming and Raver so intelligent in their roles that they carry scenes that should just keel over and die.
  7. Lipstick Jungle apparently still isn't sure we get the point about bonding, because it goes out of its way to make it clear that even sympathetic male characters don't.
  8. 50
    The series has laid groundwork for minor and mostly predictable complications.
  9. Lipstick Jungle isn't that bad. It's more like "awww."; Not as in "Awww, isn't it cute?" but "Awww, little Candy didn't do as well this time as everybody hoped."
  10. I should probably feel bad, too, about finding all this silliness passably amusing, especially after having trashed its evil stepsister on ABC. But somehow I don't.
  11. Reviewed by: Ken Tucker
    42
    Lipstick Jungle is full of awful lines.
  12. Reviewed by: Brian Lowry
    40
    The strongest and one redeeming storyline involves Raver.
  13. Thoroughly average and unfailingly adequate, NBC's Lipstick Jungle is easier to like than ABC's cold, cynical "Cashmere Mafia," but that's like putting lipstick on a pig, albeit a pig dressed in couture.
  14. 37
    You're stuck with a dull mush that works neither as drama, comedy or camp trash.
  15. 30
    Lipstick Jungle is a strangely dour affair--its shadowy, chilly depiction of New York fits right alongside the NBC house style of Law & Order--and is almost misshapen in its clunky blend of drama and comedy.
  16. Lipstick Jungle wrongheadedly wants to have it both ways--to celebrate and explore the lives and loves of women at the top through protagonists who don't have the drive or the depth to make it there.
  17. Lipstick Jungle is a wooden clog of a melodrama squeezed into a flimsy, satin and marabou mule.
  18. 30
    It's nearly a certainty that someone will call Lipstick Jungle, NBC's new drama series about sensual and successful women, a "guilty pleasure," but it's really more of a guilty horror.
  19. The show itself is so poorly conceived that you can only pity the viewer who gets lost in this Jungle.
  20. What the obnoxious "Cashmere Mafia" and now the dull Lipstick Jungle suggest is that it's not as easy to recreate the "Sex and the City" phenomenon as assembling three or four attractive actresses of a certain age and pairing them with a name producer from the HBO show.
  21. Please say this is entertainment--and nothing more. That might not make it all right, but it would restore a whole lot of faith.
  22. 20
    Better to wait for the big-screen movie of "Sex and the City," arriving May 30.
  23. 20
    No matter how horrible the clichés or gorgeous the gowns, they can't distract from the androphobic virulence at the heart of Lipstick Jungle.
  24. Reviewed by: Troy Patterson
    20
    It's all the same stuff--magazine parties, feckless husbands, tempting male bimbos...but without "Cashmere Mafia's" redeeming air of farce.
  25. Reviewed by: Matt Roush
    20
    Which "Sex and the City" knockoff is worse, ABC's "Cashmere Mafia" or NBC's Lipstick Jungle (based on Sex author Candace Bushnell's best-seller)? It really depends which one you're watching at the time. Both are simply dreadful, failing miserably at making their glamorously high-powered heroines sympathetic, credible or remotely interesting.
  26. 10
    What do women want? Well, they don’t want another migraine-inducing soap opera about the lives of high-strung, whiny female executives in New York. I’m pretty sure of that.
  27. Reviewed by: Diane Werts
    10
    NBC's superficial knockoff is just Lipstick on a pig.
User Score

Mixed or average reviews- based on 37 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 12 out of 19
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 19
  3. Negative: 7 out of 19
  1. belindah
    1
    Dull. The characters have no charisma!
  2. voodoocookie
    0
    Saw the pilot long time ago and was enough to put me off not to ever give this show another chance! Heard Cashmere Mafia is similiar type show and this pilot was such a waste of time that I have decided not to give the other show a chance at all! Full Review »
  3. ChicagoViewer
    0
    What an abomination. More cliches per second than an encyclopedia of cliches.