Let’s review what the past few months of scripted TV have taught us about professional women: They’re brittle, demanding, insensitive to the people around them but obsessed with their own wants and needs. Oh, and they love shoes.
The midseason series “Lipstick Jungle” and “Cashmere Mafia” have already covered this cliched territory pretty thoroughly, but here comes “The Return of Jezebel James” (7:30 p.m. Friday, WFLD-Ch. 32), a comedy in the same, tired vein. It also focuses on the lives of “modern women,” who, it should be noted, usually appear only on TV and bear little or no resemblance to actual women.
The Fox comedy holds another distinction: It’s “Gilmore Girls” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino’s return to network TV.
Sadly, although “Jezebel” is packed with Sherman-Palladino’s trademark snappy banter, it’s a cold, brittle misfire.
Fast-paced, tart dialogue isn’t enough to sustain a show if the people reeling it off aren’t worth spending time with.
“Jezebel James” did make me, once again, appreciate the work that Lauren Graham did as Lorelai Gilmore on “Gilmore Girls.” Graham was not only able to articulate Sherman-Palladino’s exceedingly demanding banter with ease, but the actress also made you see the vulnerability and sweetness at the core of Lorelai. She used words — lots and lots of words — to keep people at a distance, but you never doubted that she loved her daughter and friends fiercely.
And even though she and her mother had the prickliest of relationships, Graham and Karen Bishop, who played Emily Gilmore, made their scenes zing, thanks to their characters’ conflicting crosscurrents of emotion. There’s no tenderness in Parker Posey’s performance, which is all glittering surfaces and little depth. Posey plays “Jezebel’s” Sarah Tompkins, a children’s book editor who decides she wants to have a child. She finds out she can’t get pregnant, so she approaches her down-on-her luck sister, Coco (Lauren Ambrose, “Six Feet Under”) and asks Coco to have the baby for her. The siblings move in together, and hilarity is supposed to ensue but does not.
Posey seems to have a hard time connecting with other actors in her scenes, and she has zero chemistry with the warm and engaging Scott Cohen, who plays Marcus, Sarah’s “man friend.” Any show that makes me not want to watch scenes with Cohen is doing something wrong.
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