Animal rights activists be damned! Real fur beats faux fur apparently.

At least it did on Wednesday night when almost 1.6 million Aussies made themselves a hot cuppa and settled into their Jason recliners to watch that nice-faced Wiggle Anthony Field cuddle a chihuahua and lace his four-sentence intros with cabaret frowns and thoughtful pathos – tricks that have all osmosised into his blood thanks to years performing in front of toddlers.

RSPCA Animal Rescue was the most-watched show that night.

Nine’s latest great hope, Cashmere Mafia (8.30pm), could muster only 1.1 million viewers – proving, perhaps, that you should always put your money on bitches of the furry, four-legged kind if you are betting on an alley scrap between them and some city bi-arches of the faux fur, two-legged Manolo’d kind.

Watching Cashmere Mafia premiere this week, I was overcome with a bit of déjà vu. And it was déjà vu going back to the Ally McBeal days of high-powered corporate women playing quirky leading roles in snappily written TV series.

Surely we’ve come further than that, baby?

It is well-written (BONE voyage, hee hee) but I question whether it’s too much so. For God’s sake, you writers! I found myself screaming: “Try challenging yourself to craft a script that’s not so scripted.”

Sounds stupid, I know, but it’s really as simple as deliberately writing in a few nothing words like Um or Er and then having them well acted to convey some speech spontaneity and, voila, you actually have characters who speak like us normal people do every day.

I know our four leads are playing sharp career women who don’t have time to waste words let alone press the wrong button on their ubiquitous Blackberry, but please, real them up and boost their likeability.

Delicious Lucy Liu as Mia Mason and promising newcomer Bonnie Somerville as Caitlin Dowd are great and clearly having fun, being granted some first ep juiciness in the form of a marriage proposal and some sexuality question marks, respectively.

The other two are less impressive. Sad, really, as they are Aussie actresses Frances O’Connor and Miranda Otto and they got some good early storylines, too, with some feral kids and a cheating husband.

They all have wonderfully slick jobs in advertising or publishing and they utter phrases like “I can push back my 4 o’clock”, but it’s all so year 2000.

I’m tired of the “mummy’s a company CEO and in a very important meeting, so throw that ball at my head later”, and the “I wasn’t there when you boys made the rules, so I’m going to make my own”, and the “I might be the only woman at the board room table, but you men can get your own coffee” approach.

Yawn.

The premise seems old, tired and gathering the dust that shook off from other similar shows like Ally, Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City a long time ago.

Girls, even Mary Tyler Moore’s been here and done this.

Perhaps the most infuriating part – and the bit that really makes this entire picture not quite right – is the prevalence of sex. And that comment is not some insight into my level of prudishness, believe me.

Watch the scenes involving endless meetings, pressure phone calls, children taming and client schmoozing at all hours, and then marvel how these chicks flounce daintily into the satin sheets into the waiting arms of a chisel-jawed hunk for a bit of horizontal tango once the lights go out. Crap.

A woman who works 18-hour days should quite rightly flop into bed wearing a stained Broncos T-shirt, a frown and dribble from a skulled glass of shiraz, before sleeping like the dead until her alarm jolts her onto the treadmill at 5am.

I question whether the “brains” behind this show, who may very well have set out to portray women as tenacious, intelligent, multi-tasking dynamos, have actually ended up painting them simply as 1950s housewives with a modern twist … think June Cleaver with a Blackberry.

And that’s not a pie I’m talking about.

— REBECCA MARSHALL