PEARSON: Second look at girl power

By Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published February 7, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Andrew Eccles / NBC

Lipstick Jungle stars Brooke Shields, left, as Wendy, Kim Raver as Nico and Lindsay Price as Victory.

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Lipstick Jungle

* When and where: 9 p.m. today, KUSA-Channel 9

It's a jungle out there.

Not in the corporate world, but on the living-room couch as you try to puzzle through a series like Lipstick Jungle.

To be fair, the NBC show based on Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell's novel was in play before ABC's Cashmere Mafia from Sex producer Darren Star, which launched a few weeks ago. Both ply similar story lines: Successful female best friends trying to have it all in Manhattan.

I liked Cashmere Mafia, despite its sometimes strident tone. Lipstick Jungle is no less strident, but it throws in male-bashing for good measure.

Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields) is a studio executive trying to balance star demands (she wants Leonardo DiCaprio to do a movie) with getting her son into an exclusive elementary school. Nico Reilly (Kim Raver) is editor of a hot fashion magazine who butts heads with her boss (Julian Sands). She wants to become CEO of the company; he's afraid she'll split to have a baby.

Then there's Victory Ford (Lindsay Price), a top fashion designer having an affair with a quirky billionaire (Andrew McCarthy). She's an independent spirit but doesn't mind being pampered.

There's nary a sympathetic male in this opening hour (just insensitive bosses and husbands), unless you count Kirby (Robert Buckley), the boy toy with whom Nico has an afternoon delight.

The only thing missing from this small-screen chick flick is Helen Reddy singing I Am Woman.

There's always next week.

Bernard and Doris

* When and where: 6 p.m. Saturday, HBO

This is a story about strange bedfellows, figuratively if not literally.

In 1987, a recovering Irish alcoholic named Bernard Lafferty arrived at the New Jersey estate of Doris Duke, the eccentric tobacco heiress and the richest woman in America. She'd recently fired her butler (he served her cantaloupe that was too cold) and was in the market for a new one. With the blitheness of a woman trying on a new pair of shoes, she hired Bernard.

Over the next six years he became her closest confidante and, ultimately, the executor of her billion-dollar estate.

How did a pauper bewitch a princess?

That's what director Bob Balaban and company attempt to explore, admitting from the start that many of the facts here are made up. We simply don't know what went on behind the "palace" gates.

What we do know is that Duke (Susan Sarandon) was demanding, constantly flitting between homes in New Jersey, Hawaii and Beverly Hills, and that Lafferty (Ralph Fiennes) was gay. They were together for six years before Duke's death, which her attorneys tried to prove came at Lafferty's hands. No such evidence existed and he died three years after her.

Despite a penchant for conjecture - Duke is seen confessing to Lafferty that her mother killed her father, hoping to inherit all his money - the driving force here is the performances.

Fiennes is as understated (and, yes, even a little creepy) as you've ever seen him, and Sarandon chews the scenery without going for operatic excess. She's regal, spoiled and sublime.

What really happened between Doris Duke and her butler? We'll probably never know, but as speculative biography goes, Bernard and Doris is still plenty entertaining.

Six Degrees Could Change the World

* When and where: 6 p.m. Sunday, National Geographic Channel

If you thought Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was scary, this special report will curl your toes.

The basic conceit: If the world were to cool 6 degrees from its present average temperature, we'd be in a new ice age. Six degrees warmer and we'd have dust bowls running rampant across the land.

Alec Baldwin narrates the documentary, which is chock-full of experts talking about melting polar ice caps and computer-generated graphics of what New York would look like under water.

The show emphasizes warming, not cooling, and takes us through the catastrophic scenarios. A 2- degree rise in temperature would decimate the world's coral reefs, where more than 1 million species live, breed and feed. An increase of 5 degrees would render large por- tions of the planet uninhabitable. At 6 degrees, we ought to be on space ships looking for a new home.

Some of the material is familiar, but much of it is presented in a new and compelling way. Take the common cheeseburger. One scientist looks at the carbon footprint of the 900 million cheeseburgers Americans consume each week.

Factoring in the production and slaughter of cows, cheese, bovine-related methane and transportation, he estimates the cheeseburger is responsible for 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Six Degrees is the ecological equivalent of Scared Straight. Even knowing many of these facts going in doesn't make hearing them any less scary.

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