They aren't real friends...

With Scandal, Revenge, and New Girl on summer break, I started watching Mistresses to curb my good-bad TV addiction.  I love the post-racial friendships between the white, Korean, and black chicks. I love the bi-racial love child. I love that the women are in their thirties and relatively successful at their careers.  I love the black girl's hair and make-up. (I must find out what blush they us on her).  I love the young real estate agent's clothes. (The Union Jack clutch is beyond beyond, and I want it).  I love Alyssa Milano's  hot Aussie husband.  I love the glazed white subway tile in Alyssa Milano's kitchen.  I love, in the second episode, how they framed and hung beautiful Himalayan jewelry on the wall as art (totally doing that). And that's about it.

Though I will keep watching Mistresses, at least until I find out who the baby daddy is, I don't see the show being renewed for a second season for one major reason- the ladies are not real friends. Sex and the City, Girls, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta ("lowdown monkey with a wig on!") are so successful because they have been able to capture the complex threads that bind women together.  We tell each other everything.  We tell our dearest girl friends things we probably wouldn't share with our partners.  We go into graphic and specific detail about our latest Brazilian wax or our latest hook-up or our latest shopping splurge, or our birth control, or our periods.  Nothing is insignificant.  Nothing is a secret with your best friend. We speak in code, and in half-completed thoughts and phrases.  We know when the other is not themselves.  We buy two of everything we love because there's a very good chance that our bffer would want one too.

Mistresses is campy, and shiny, and has most of the ingredients needed to make a hit show, but until they figure out how to gel the women together beyond "we've known each other since childhood" this show won't last.  How is it possible to be sleeping with your client for two years and your friends not know?  How is it possible that your dead husband comes back from the grave and you don't call your best friend right away?  How is it possible that you're having an affair with a man at work and your friends don't know that there was already trouble in paradise before the cliche hook-up at the office on the desk and without a condom for that matter?  Talk about being socially irresponsible and lacking creativity.  The world doesn't need anymore bad scripted TV.  Life's too short to be sucked into a mediocre melodrama.  So, ABC, don't take the easy way out and write about what you think women are like (sexually ambivalent, indecisive, weak-willed, and stupid), actually dive into what really drives and motivates us to do what we do.  A hot black colleague isn't enough to make us cheat on a hot Aussie who can cook and surf.