Becoming Ms. Big

By James Poniewozik

If Hillary Clinton's campaign were a TV show, what kind of TV show would it be? Her message focuses on her experience and wonkish policy competence, with a touch of glass-ceiling-breaking empowerment: The West Wing, by way of Lifetime. Yet voters came to know her as both a political figure and the star of a domestic drama: her husband's infidelity and impeachment. "She has the soapiest personal story, combined with the potential to be the most powerful leader in the world," says Darren Star, former producer of Sex and the City. "The tension between the two is what's really interesting to me. Women's careers have changed, but in many ways their personal lives haven't."

Call it a feminist soap opera, then, which is not the contradiction in terms it might seem. Feminism gave us the mantra "The personal is political." And that can cut two ways. Hillary has relied on a connection with women as an electoral base. She's had her cleavage and her tears pored over by the media and benefited from the backlash. She's had Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC'S Hardball--is there a more male title in all of TV?--claim that "the reason she may be a front runner is her husband messed around," had Rush Limbaugh asking whether America wants to watch a woman aging in the Oval Office and faced a young guy yelling "Iron my shirt!" at a rally. (Not to mention: a male journalist writes about a woman presidential candidate--and of course he runs with the "soap opera" metaphor!)

So it's one of those inexplicable feats of pop-culture timing that this is also the season of the feminist soap opera in prime-time TV. Cashmere Mafia on ABC and Lipstick Jungle on NBC both center on high-income, high-powered, high-style Manhattan friends who talk business and love lives over expense-account lunches. In the process they raise some of the same questions the presidential race does: Is women's success held against them? Can they be different yet equal? Can they stand by their men and get stood by in return?

If the shows recall Sex and the City--which returns as a movie this summer--it's no coincidence. Cashmere is produced by Star, Lipstick by Candace Bushnell, who wrote the newspaper column SATC was based on. SATC combined a fashion-conscious urban fairy tale with sharp observation of the trade-offs working women face: a little glass slipper, a little glass ceiling. It was a love story that was also about loving yourself; the series ended with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) persuading wealthy flame Mr. Big to move to New York City--where her life and career were--rather than moving for him.

Cashmere and Lipstick borrow this setting but give their characters promotions, husbands, kids and a lot more cash. (As Star says, they can actually qfford the clothes we saw on SATC) Cashmere's quartet includes a hotel coo, an investment banker, a marketing executive and a magazine publisher; Lipstick's trio consists of a movie-studio head, a fashion designer and another magazine bigwig. (Memo to producers: Please inform my bosses how lavishly paid magazine workers are supposed to be.)

Says Bushnell: Her new characters are like Carrie & Co.--except that instead of wooing Mr. Big, they've become Ms. Big. "They've figured out a lot more than you've figured out in your 30s," she says. "They can have ideas and be able to fulfill them. The right handbag or shoes are fun, but for successful women I know, the real glamour in life is achievement."

This being TV, the romance of power is balanced by the romance of romance: there are boyfriends, marriages and affairs--his and hers--along with the business intrigue. But the shows also share the theme that stereotypes and double standards don't stop at the door of a corner office; the same behavior that gets applauded in men gets women labeled ice queens, bad mothers and bitches. In Cashmere, publisher Mia (Lucy Liu) is asked to sign off on a men's-magazine cover, for a story about predatory businesswomen, with a terrified man on a dinner plate and a pair of nail-polished hands about to dig in. "It's the Zeitgeist," a male editor tells her. "Female execs are taking over. Movie studios, Silicon Valley, maybe our next President--God help us."

Perhaps he just disagrees with Hillary's health-care platform. But as Martha Stewart and Katie Couric have discovered, high-powered women are prone to the Goldilocks dilemma: This one's too hard! That one's too soft! "Women aren't allowed to express their ambitions sometimes," says Oliver Goldstick, writer-producer of Lipstick. "There's a long tradition of Hollywood pictures where powerful women are punished for their success."

A third of married women in the U.S. earn more than their husbands, but it's still a challenge to make the problems of big shots appeal to a mass audience. Some of the stories on Lipstick and Cashmere are universal: both have had plots about juggling work with a son's birthday party. Others are less so: What to do when your nanny raids the good Bordeaux or writes a tell-all roman `a clef about you?

Not everyone is going to identify with people whose biggest problem is being oppressed by the household help. Cashmere's ratings have been weak--although that may have more to do with its cardboard characters and predictable, Soap 101 story lines than its milieu. Like too many SATC clones, it's glib but not insightful, and its characters seem like a random quartet of women with no real chemistry as friends.

Lipstick is funnier and more sophisticated, fitting better in SATC's Jimmy Choos. It's driven by the power trio's layered friendship; mogul mom Wendy (Brooke Shields) is the big sister of the group, designer Victory (Lindsay Price) the angsty young sib, and editor Nico (Kim Raver) the deceptively low-key one. The men are neither pigs nor saints, and the women are not perfect--Nico is having an affair, as much a betrayal of her friends, whom she hides it from, as of her husband. But the show makes them seem normal and grounded in contrast to a world of crazy, amoral rich people. (When Wendy refuses her young daughter a cell phone, another mom jadedly counsels, "Give her the phone, and be grateful it's not an abortion")

This isn't the kind of picture of women and money that has mainly sold on TV lately, though. Take the Golden State hausfraus of Bravo's reality hit The Real Housewives of Orange County, whose concerns are boob jobs, baubles and Botox. ("One of my biggest goals now is to look as hot as I can," declares one.) And in Bravo's The Millionaire Matchmaker, dating guru Patti Stanger hooks up single women with sugar daddies, warning one not to introduce herself as a doctor: "If you lead with your business foot, the man's ding-dong down there neutralizes and goes down. He doesn't want to compete in the bedroom!"

Ironically, some of the strongest women in recent TV have been in shows aimed at men. Fox's hit Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and NBC's Chuck feature men being protected by superpowerful women (O.K., superhot too). The TV season has been full of nerdy, sensitive men (The Big Bang Theory, Pushing Daisies) and dominating women (Damages, Bionic Woman). Most of those shows target young men, who--born after the equal-rights movement and in the era of divorce--might have had female bosses or been raised by single moms. For them, female authority figures may be many things, but they are not anomalies.

This is not to say men are now unthreatened by women in power--just ask the "Iron my shirt" guy. It is to say that people are less monolithic than the narratives of politics and show biz have made them out to be. Lipstick takes a step toward showing that. For instance, the publisher of the tell-all unfairly labeling Wendy a "bad mommy" turns out to be a woman (Lorraine Bracco).

The TV show with the most nuanced take on gender now is actually a sitcom: 30 Rock. Through comedy-show producer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey)--a woman middle manager in an overgrown-boys' field--it has dealt with topics from misogynist swear words to the gap between baby-boom and Gen-X feminists with a gender-consciousness that's unashamed but unafraid to make fun of itself. (In one flashback, teenage Liz sues her high school to become placekicker on the football team; she flubs a kick and cheers, "Yeah! Feminism!") Liz isn't powerful enough to be in a mafia yet, but in 10 years she might join one. Or change it.

And her politics? "There is an 80% chance in the next election," she says in one episode, "that I will tell all my friends that I'm voting for Barack Obama but I will secretly vote for John McCain." Hillary, take note. Maybe she's still persuadable.

MORE TELEVISION To read more by James Poniewozik, go to his blog, Tuned In, at time.com/tunedin