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And that she is. "She is a walking cartoon, a sight gag, and she knows it," says J.F. Lawton, the show's creator and screenwriter of Pretty Woman. "This year she is wearing the most ridiculous things in the world. Half the clothes come right out of her own closet." The show is in the classic giggle-and-jiggle genre. "We have more explosions and babes per minute than any other TV show. We're unapologetic about the sexiness," says Lawton. "But if handled the right way, it's not offensive to women."
The show has not yet found that way. Even in her newly trimmed-down state, Lee is outrageous. But V.I.P. is swiftly paced, self-consciously flip, includes a cleverly cast celebrity cameo in each episode (Loni Anderson has appeared as Lee's mother) and, most important, contains one sexy scene and one action scene every 10 minutes.
Relic Hunter, starring Wayne's World's Tia Carrere as a female Indiana Jones, is produced by France's Gaumont Television and Canada's Fireworks Entertainment. The opening of the first episode, which aired in September, featured Carrere's bikinied Professor Sydney Fox teaching her students a sexy African dance, followed by a scene in which she talks to her assistant while wearing a tasteful taupe lace bra-and-panty set. "We skate the line of historical frolic," says Carrere, delivering a line she'd never get to say on the show. "What I like is if there are children watching, maybe they will imagine going to Tibet or Berlin or any of these places." But the kids sure will be disappointed when they discover that few old churches house nude health spas.
Still, Relic Hunter is a masterpiece compared with Peter Benchley's Amazon, an adventure show starring former model Carol Alt and created by Benchley, who wrote Jaws. Not only is the series slow moving and badly produced, it doesn't show much skin. Instead of having fun with a story about a land of beautiful giant women, Amazon has six passengers of a crashed plane wandering aimlessly in the South American jungle. One would think the women's clothes would be shredded and useless after the first week, but somehow they always appear dry-cleaned.
In one segment, set in the drenching rain, a character offers up her shirt to shelter the group's campfire. But just when it seems like there will be some gratuitous seminudity, the scene devolves into a gruesome amputation ending in death. Plus, she gets her shirt back by the following scene. And when these women enter the Amazon, they get wet only up to the waist. It's like a whole show of nothing but lifeguard rescues. "One of the challenges we face is to keep the historical and anthropological interest alive while also having beautiful women in jeopardy," explains Benchley. How about you just find deeper rivers, Pete?
Likewise, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, produced by Animal House director John Landis and featuring Jennifer O'Dell, needs to up the babe quotient and tone down the silly adventure plots. But a couple of shows for next year look to have more potential. Former Baywatch star Gena Lee Nolin will star in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, in which she will morph her body into animals'. That can't be bad. The only catch is that Sheena will focus on saving the environment, which means the show will have to include a lot of leopard morphs to make it worth watching.