LisaRaye McCoy, Stacey Dash and Charity Shea star in VH1's “Single Ladies.� The series, which premiered Monday, is scheduled for additional showings, including today at 3 p.m.
VH1

By Hank Stuever / The Washington Post

“Single Ladies,� a new VH1 soap opera, exists in a gold-flecked nightmare version of Atlanta second wedding dresses , where life can be winnowed down to the lyrics of assertive pop songs and a series of upscale, urban cliches. It's all champagne fountains, micro-miniskirts and cuisine served by, as one show-off suitor tells a single lady, “my personal four-star chef.� In this world, when a sister is feeling down (and/or stressed-out about trying to launch her fancy dress boutique of dis-tinc-tion), nothing can cheer her up as much as signing the lease on a new Jaguar.

That sort of high-end, bougie consumer nonsense is, I guess, part of the escapism offered by “ wedding flowers with teal dresses ;Single Ladies,â€? which borrows its title from the fully charred Beyoncé hit and the equally overdone idea that female viewers are still (still!) waiting to exhale, waiting for Mr. Big, waiting for the next everything-must-go stampede on low-cut wedding dresses .

This is a series for people who found “Sex and the Cityâ royal blue wedding dresses €? too quick-witted and “The Wendy Williams Showâ€? too intellectually stimulating. It's the TV equivalent of a beach read with no words. Even if “Single Ladiesâ€? can be enjoyed in some basic brainless way (and even though it's safely sequestered on VH1, where standards are aggressively low), there's something steadfastly embarrassing about it.

The women seem to be operating from a false sense of empowerment, a soulfulness which unfortunately reads as soullessness. The men all talk like that grandiloquently suave Old Spice spokesman who rides his stallion shirtless. “Single Ladiesâ€? dares the more sheltered among us to ask: â hot summer wedding dresses hot summer wedding dresses€œAre there people who really look and talk like this?â€?

Yes, and they're on a show called “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,� which indeed makes “ beach wedding dresses beach wedding dresses;Single Ladies� seem redundant and strangely off-key — to say nothing of how it further advances depressing stereotypes of the black upper-middle class. Again we see popular culture's bad habit of validating minorities by reaching for their lowest common denominators. Here, people are judged by outdated estimations of what used to be known as bling.

Executive-produced by Queen Latifah, who once upon a time seemed to know better, the two-hour launch of “Single Ladies� tosses uncertainly between a serious attempt at a relationship drama and a pathetic stab at ... camp, I suppose nice flower girl dresses ? It's about three women (their group will expand to four in a couple of episodes) trying to figure out what they want from relationships. Val (Stacey Dash) has just been dumped by her longtime beau after she demanded that he — altogether now — “put a ring on it.� (He declines.)

Val's best friend, Keisha (LisaRaye McCoy), is a professional poker player who, despite her advanced age, still sometimes appears as an underclad vixen in hip-hop videos. When she shows up for her latest shoot in a new Cam'ron video, she is handed a pink business suit and informed that she's playing an older, but still trampy, woman. (Oh, the indignity.) Lastly, there is April (Charity Shea), the token white friend, a platinum blonde who has married the dream black man — only she's cheating on him with Atlanta's sexy-smooth mayor (played by rapper Common).

Enduring two hours of terrible writing and acting would be bad enough, but there is something else: “Single Ladies� is astonishingly lacking a moral center that should be the subtext of even the most tawdry fiction. I'm not talking about the bed-hopping, the cheating, the conspicuous consumption and, in Keisha's case, the theft of a diamond-encrusted watch from the Cam'ron video shoot. I was struck more by how easily the three women tell lies to protect one another, in a sort of gender-reversed version of the “bros before hos� rule: Did you steal that watch? (No, Keisha lies.) Are you sleeping with the mayor? (No, April lies.) Did you lie to me about my wife's cheating? (No, stammers Val.) There's no one to root for here; everyone is ethically unctuous.

Val's boyfriend reminds her, in more colorful language, that she's a grown woman. That's exactly what I was thinking, watching “Single Ladies�: The two lead actresses are in their 40s, dressed like they're in their 20s, saddled with the impulse-control issues of preteens. This is supposed to be a show about adults? For adults?

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