The weaker sex?

Yet again, this is a glossy, fluffy confection that assumes what all women have in common is an obsession with handbags, a taste for cocktails and thehabit of regularly bursting into tears publicly.

It's not the first show to attach itself to the designer coat-tails of the phenomenal hit series: Desperate Housewives (with its four dissimilar female friends) and Ugly Betty (set in the world of fashion magazines) have tried to cash in on SATC's popularity. The constant voiceover in teen drama Gossip Girl also owes a debt to Bradshaw's neurotic narration. Cashmere Mafia, another new chic urban drama series created by SATC producer Darren Star and starring Lucy Liu, has yet to be aired in the UK, but expect to see more of the same in terms of designer labels and well-groomed New York career women.

So far, Lipstick Jungle has the best credentials, being based on a book by Candace Bushnell whose original newspaper column and novel were the basis for Sex and the City (though the TV version played up the romance and toned down the cynicism evident in her original writing).

But Bushnell claims Lipstick Jungle is a more mature version of her hit novel – "Menopause and the City", perhaps. "I've always written about the women I know," she said of the book. "Ten years ago it was single women in their thirties whose focus was more on men, having fun and creating excitement than it was on their careers.

"Now I'm writing about what happens when those women hit their forties. Whether they're married or not, they've realised that Mr Big is not going to come along and save them. They know that they alone are responsible for whether they are going to create meaningful lives for themselves."

It sounds good in theory, but the first glimpse of Lipstick Jungle on the screen isn't of a business meeting or a briefcase: it's high-heeled shoes – again – followed by a fashion show. The characters may be slightly older and there may be a little more emphasis on their jobs (Nico is a magazine editor, Victory a designer and Wendy, played by Brooke Shields, is a movie producer and mother), but it's all just a glamorous and distracting backdrop to the troubles they're having with men.

The producer's house-husband resents her success; the editor is discriminated against at work and cheating on her dull husband with a toyboy model, while the designer is being sent private jets and roomfuls of flowers by an admiring bazillionaire. This, admittedly, is not really so much of a problem, especially as he is Andrew McCarthy, still playing the rich boy from Pretty In Pink (which the designer pays tribute to by wearing a weird outfit seemingly made of pink popcorn).

The three friends are fond of declaring that they are strong women, dammit, that they're worth it and no man is going to put them down. "I find it offensive that women feel they have to apologise for their success," huffs Nico. "You want me to apologise for who I am!" cries Wendy to her whiny husband. "I hate that you sent a jet for me and I hate that I liked riding in it so much," snaps Victory to the bazillionaire.

But for all their bravado, within the first episode all three of the women are in tears about something and have to console each other with cakes.

These may be the women that Candace Bushnell knows, but it's safe to say that for most of us, this is no more realistic than the fashion spreads of a glossy women's magazine. Does this matter? In itself, Lipstick Jungle is just the latest frothy nonsense, but it does represent the continuation of a trend that Sex And The City, perhaps unknowingly, started. Although obviously there were contemporary women in TV dramas before SATC – such as Mary Tyler Moore, who shows up later on Lipstick Jungle playing Brooke Shields' mother – since the success of Carrie & Co, fictional programmes aimed at women have followed its mould slavishly. There must be shoes and expensive clothes, there must be mandatory female bonding sessions with chocolate or alcohol (even if you can never understand what these characters may have in common) and there must be rich men and pretty boys who are only there either to mess around our heroines or worship them.

It's hen party TV and, while it may appeal at times, it's pretty limiting that this is becoming the only way in which women's lives are represented on screen – especially for those of us who find shoe shopping about as exciting as going to the dentist and have never discussed our friends' intimate sex lives over a cosmopolitan.

Professor Christine Geraghty, a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow, says glamour and fashion are often an "added extra" in stories aimed at women. "There has always been a slight fantasy element of how we might wish our lives to be, as opposed to how they are and there is a desire for something different," she says. "Sex and the City did that rather cleverly, at least in the beginning, and spread these issues across its four characters which triggered that strong sense of identification.

"Obviously fashion and such like are things that (many] women do enjoy, so you could say that the programmes offered that as an additional element. But what it confirmed was the association with consumption: the handbags, the shoes, the clothes – they took over."

In an attempt to cash in on the same audience, Lipstick Jungle's official website urges fans to get together for girly viewing parties and pushes the merchandise shown on the show: liked Wendy's earrings? Then click on a link to buy them – or Nico's bag, or Victory's shoes. And to promote its British debut, the Virgin1 channel launched "lipstick lattes" at coffee shops and gave away dinky mirrors at train stations. It's enough to make you burn your (designer) bra. In fact, even Bushnell herself is now jumping back on her own bandwagon, having just announced two forthcoming books based on Carrie's teenage years in an attempt to extend her "brand".

That seems apt, since a feature of the post-SATC trend has been to present its heroines as ditzy dames who act their shoe sizes, not their age, like Desperate Housewives' silly Susan, who's always making ridiculous social gaffes.

"There's an infantilising of women in these programmes – they fall off their high heels or are still obsessed with handbags in their thirties," agrees Geraghty. "And there's an acceptance of a completely feminine persona, while many women do not see themselves as pink and fluffy.

"If you go back to the 1930s screwball comedies, the women never stopped talking and they never gave into the men – they had that femininity and glamour but without the infantilisation."

The likes of Carole Lombard or Bette Davis wouldn't have stood for the vacillations of Mr Big, it's true: they'd have socked him in the jaw.

You can see how things have changed by comparing the original 1939 film of The Women with this year's remake, replacing Norma Shearer's class with Meg Ryan's trout pout and, perhaps inevitably, with an advertising campaign pitching it in the Sex and the City style.

Oddly enough, Carrie Bradshaw's own big-screen outing this summer was a more downbeat affair, showing the four women beset by (slightly) more realistic problems. Time will tell if Lipstick Jungle can follow its model that far, though ratings in America have so far been average – which suggests perhaps the post-SATC trend for fluffy, glossy women's TV could be passing. Maybe we'll even see a show about women who don't live in New York but who do wear flat shoes.