Cashmere Mafia Grows on Me (But Just a Little)

Heaven help me, I didn't hate Cashmere Mafia yesterday. 

I know, that should be a good thing, but for some reason it isn't.  I went into the episode fully expecting to be just as displeased with it this week as I was last week (you may recall I was quite displeased).  Sure there were still moments that irked me, irked me mightily, but there were actually some vaguely interesting things in there too.

Bonnie Sommerville's character, Caitlin, the make-up PR person, is so far one of the most interesting on the show.  She has apparently, relationship-wise, been a mess her whole life and is now contemplating whether or not she might be homosexual.  She says, I think truthfully, that she is more interested in finding a good relationship with someone that she cares for than concerning herself with whether she is gay or straight.  I like that attitude.  She wants to be happy and be with someone who makes her happy.  If it's a woman, it's a woman; if it's a man, it's a man.  I say whatever floats her boat.  There's a refreshing sort of honesty about her that I enjoy.

But then there's Miranda Otto's Juliet.  I like Miranda Otto, I think she's a good actress, but I hate Juliet.  She was going to have an affair, then she wasn't, then she was, then she couldn't, then she wished she had.  All in the same episode and it all stems from her husband being a lying, cheating, SOB.  I don't get it.  Why is she pondering whether or not to have an affair?  She doesn't love the man, she doesn't even like him after last night, she ought to just leave him and be done with it.  Why are we pussyfooting around? 

The less I say about Lucy Liu's Mia, the better.  She's a high-powered publisher who insisted on putting into a men's magazine a letter from the publisher berating men.  She disliked the cover of the magazine (which pictured a faceless corporate woman devouring a little man who was lying on a plate) to the point where she wrote a letter to the readers saying they should "be a man" about corporate women.  Wow.  I see circulation plummeting.  It's not that she's wrong, she just went about airing her grievances in the wrong way.  Surely there is an article inside the magazine that deals with the issue on the cover and surely that article could have been tweaked to reflect the fact that men need to accept women bosses in the workplace. 

Okay, so those were a lot of complaints, and yet I say that I didn't hate last night's episode.  Some of it was because of Caitlin, some of it was because I like Miranda Otto, and a lot of it was because of Zoe's (Frances O'Connor) storyline.  Zoe was trying to put out the fire of a married male colleague sleeping with the pretty young blonde researcher.  She knew what the right thing to do was, she knew her colleague shouldn't be having the affair.  So she tried to make him end it and he did.  But, he also moved the girl to another area in the company and got threatened with a lawsuit.  It was great.  Plus, you just know that the guy is going to sleep with the girl again.  It's like watching a train wreck, Zoe is standing right there, she's going to get hit with shrapnel, and yet there's nothing she can do about it.

Now that's good TV and just the sort of thing I want to see out of this show.