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The NBC dramedy Lipstick Jungle was based on the novel of the same name by former Sex in the City producer Candace Bushnell. The series revolved around the lives and loves of three very wealthy, very powerful, and very mixed-up Manhattan career women. Brooke Shields headed the cast as film executive Wendy Healy, CEO of Parador Pictures, who encountered difficulty juggling her professional duties with her personal obligations to her husband Shane (Paul Blackthorne), and had recently been saddled with a worthy antagonist in the form of Parador's new owner, the Murdoch-like media mogul Hector Matrick (Julian Sands). Wendy's two best friends were fashion-magazine editor Nico Reilly (Kim Raver), whose marriage to a lowly college professor did not prevent her from playing the field sexually; and temperamental fashion designer Victory Ford (Lindsay Price), whose business was in the sort of serious financial trouble that only a marriage to handsome billionaire Joe Bennett (Andrew McCarthy), could resolve. Despite the character flaws of the three angst-driven heroines, the male characters were generally the villains of the peace, displaying in abundance such shortcomings as weakness and hedonism. Lipstick Jungle premiered on February 7, 2008, some four weeks after the debut of the strikingly similar ABC weekly Cashmere Mafia--which, by an astonishing coincidence, was created by Candace Bushnell's former Sex and the City partner Darren Star.