As recently as the early 1990s, New York City was still considered a relatively dangerous place to live. Drug dealers abounded on every downtown corner, muttering, “Smo, smo, smo” (“Smoke”), from the shadows. There were, of course, a lot of vagabonds around, and squeegee men, and people who talked to themselves loudly on the street without the excuse that they were holding a cell phone. Even thugs who were apt to put a gun to your head when asking for money. Some of them went on to pull the trigger after you’d given it to them.

Then along came Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, together with police commissioner William Bratton and the “Broken Windows” theory of crime, and gradually the dealers and graffiti and violence receded. Times Square became the new Disneyland, playgrounds and children returned to Tompkins Square Park, and pit bulls were replaced by lap dogs. The Internet became the star of the decade, geeks ruled, and making loads of money was considered deeply cool.

Well, it had to happen. Being robbed isn’t amusing, and it’s not Mayor Giuliani’s fault that there was nothing interesting in the culture to replace the remnants of punk and the romance of grit that fueled shows such as “NYPD Blue,” even as they were disappearing. Now New York is a frenetic but slightly bland city in which every third person seems to be his own or someone else’s publicist. Yet the need to mythologize the place goes on, even if nothing much is happening, and television shows do their best to keep the glow of romance alive.

The latest entrant is NBC’s “Lipstick Jungle” (the title is an obvious play on the city’s previous reputation as a “concrete jungle”), joining a line of shows (“Sex and the City,” “Ugly Betty,” “Gossip Girl,” “Big Shots,” “Dirty Sexy Money,” “Cashmere Mafia,” etc.) obsessed with money, fashion, and the standoff between the sexes. It’s been known for months that “Lipstick Jungle,” which makes its premiere on Thursday but was supposed to have come out late last year, is bad, and on the whole it lives up to its billing. Based, like “Sex and the City,” on a book by Candace Bushnell, it asks us to care about its three principal characters before we barely know who they are, and things generally go downhill when we do.

The principals in question are Wendy Healy (Brooke Shields), a movie executive whose professional accomplishments dwarf those of her British husband, Shane (Paul Blackthorne), who takes care of the kids, wears leather jackets, and neglects to shave; Victory Ford (Lindsay Price), a vapid fashion designer being courted by Joe Bennett (Andrew McCarthy), a multibillionaire whose collection of private jets probably outnumbers Jay Leno’s collection of classic cars, and Nico O’Reilly (Kim Raver), editor of Bonfire magazine and the wife of a gray-haired academic who is “into books — writing them, reading them, and discussing them,” and whose unspoken opinion of Bonfire is that it should take a cue from its name and be burned. I suspect he thinks the same thing about “Lipstick Jungle” itself, which is probably why he isn’t even credited on NBC’s Web site.

In the pilot episode’s best scene, Nico comes home one night, still aflutter after being wooed by a handsome boy-toy who has written his phone number on her thigh with a black marker pen. She and her unlisted husband are in the bathroom, and he not only fails to notice all the ink on her leg, which she has deliberately bared, along with her décolletage in a last-ditch attempt to get his attention, but he goes on inspecting his teeth in the mirror and talking about an upcoming academic conference. The scene has some authentic poignancy, because Ms. Raver is very good in her role, so we sympathize with her even as we get a perverse kick out of seeing a gorgeous, privileged television beauty being treated as if she were about as erotically interesting as an old lady who feeds pigeons.

If the women in ABC’s “Cashmere Mafia,” this show’s near twin, form a formidable power-quartet, the threesome in “Jungle” merely cosset and comfort one another. “I feel like a loser,” Wendy whines (sipping champagne on a rooftop terrace, mind you). “Hey, listen to me!” protests Nico. “You are not a loser! You’re scary smart, you’re gorgeous,” etc. Otherwise, the show’s preoccupations (men who are too powerful, men who aren’t powerful enough, dissatisfied stay-at-home husbands, motherhood vs. career, endless costume changes, etc.) are by now all tediously familiar.

Increasingly, what strikes me as I watch programs like “Lipstick Jungle” has less to do with the characters and their various desires and complaints and more to do with New York itself. Is it possible for a city to be photographed, or filmed, too much? Every time I see an establishing shot (the Chrysler, Central Park, meatpacking district, leafy Greenwich Village sidewalk, throng of Midtown skyscrapers, etc.), it occurs to me that it’s becoming wickedly difficult to bring fresh visual excitement to architectural structures suffering from a form of reproductive overload Walter Benjamin couldn’t have dreamed of.

By this point, almost everything looks like a cliché, and it doesn’t help when the characters themselves behave like the human equivalents of the latest gimcrack designer condos. Maybe there should be a moratorium not only on increasingly pale “Sex and the City” imitations, but on filming within New York City itself. In my mind’s eye, I see a variation on a notorious Daily News headline from the 1970s: “New York to Cinematographers: Drop Dead.”

bbernhard@earthlink.net