Tori! Tori! Tori!

Sex and the City is the obvious model for Girlfriends, a new UPN sitcom in which four fabulously dressed young women bond, battle, get stupid over shoes and try to puzzle out the man thing, with the difference in this case that they are black and live in Los Angeles and have a laugh track running beneath, or over, their conversations. Spike Lee recently knocked the show in Newsweek -- ”[I]s that the only thing black women can talk about is getting fucked? [Or “f--ked,” in Newsweekspeak.] And then the show had black men holding their johnsons and looking into the camera smiling. What white show has white men grabbing their nuts and smiling into the camera?“ Spike perhaps overestimates the sexual delicacy of ”white shows,“ many of which give nuts and johnsons more than their share of play, but I must admit that the first time I saw Girlfriends, I did keep switching the channel out of . . . what? Embarrassment? Dismay? I’d click back to find the camera focused a little too pointedly on some woman‘s shrink-wrapped bottom, or find the conversation turned to toe-sucking (in the episode titled ”Toe Sucking“), or the characters insulting each other in the unnatural way that sitcom characters do, and I’d click away again. I‘m sorry, I’m just a scaredy-cat.

But I am a professional, and gave the show another, longer look. And though I suppose it is damning with faint praise to say that Girlfriends isn‘t as bad as I first thought, the truth, is I really don’t mean to damn so much as to . . . praise faintly. Created by Mara Brock Akil (Moesha) and produced at the executive level by Kelsey Grammer, Girlfriends is not without its ills but they are ills of the artificial, exhausted, sitcomical kind, and if we factor those out, if we take those as given, if we adjust -- lower -- our expectations accordingly, we are left with an admittedly bootycentric but not actively stupid or mean-spirited entertainment, and one that makes at least a stab at representing real adult concerns in between the toe sucks. And the four women who star -- Tracee Ellis Ross, Golden Brooks, Persia White and Jill Marie Jones -- are attractive company, albeit they are still acting their assigned attitudes, rather than inhabiting fleshed-out characters. But Sex and the City had to get over that hump as well. Girlfriends won‘t be the season’s best series, but I can pretty well guarantee you it won‘t be the worst.