the power pack; A new show about the friendship between four alpha women executives plays out in the boardroom, the bedroom, and over martinis.('Cashmere Mafia')(Television program review)

The four women of the Cashmere Mafia (ABC) stride toward the camera implacable and defiant, like yuppie versions of Helmut Newton's "Big Nudes." Yuppie versions because Zoe, Caitlin, Juliet, and Mia aren't vixens or vamps, they're prissy executives. They met at Columbia Business School and found success in banking, cosmetics, hotel management, and the advertising side of publishing. They are dressed by Patricia Field as if each one were Carrie Bradshaw, in offbeat combinations of things that don't fit but show cleavage. They may run their worlds, but they still have time to meet for martinis after work, and for lunches where the wine and champagne flow. Their lunch plates stay empty, which is an important clue. Either the girls are such bad tippers that no waiter will ever bring them food, or Darren Star, who produced this series and Sex and the City, forgot the meat and potatoes. In Sex and the City, Carrie and friends ate when they sat down. In Cashmere Mafia, Zoe, Caitlin, Juliet, and Mia are starving, and so is the audience.

The tone of the series is clear when Zoe tells her husband, "It seems like everybody's having lots of sex, just not with the people they're supposed to be having it with." Played by the Australian Frances O'Connor, she's a disapproving pill. "The youngest managing director" of her banking firm, she's a by-the-rules kind of girl whose one cute trait is that she's a klutz whose driver has to clean traces of food off her suit every morning. There are two children whose calls she takes during meetings, an architect house-husband of infinite patience, and a jaw-dropping loft. It's a ...