Sex and the City (Atlanta), With Racial Politics

Even if you’ve never sweated through a Dolce & Gabbana bustier on a neon-lighted dance floor somewhere deep into a fifth or sixth shot of Grey Goose, you have surely, by virtue of living, absorbed the message of Beyoncé’s revenge-as-empowerment anthem, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” If not, let me boil it down for you: Most men are toddlers who get bored with their toys, dump them into the sandbox and then get ticked off when someone else on the playground dares to use them.

The Beyoncé woman does not respond with tears. Instead she says something like: “You know what, Bob? You should have manned up and used your Tiffany credit line to get me the three-carat Lucida when you had the chance. But now that you’ve missed your point of purchase, I’ll be acquitting myself to looking bootylicious for Marvin over here.”

Only a few minutes into “Single Ladies,” VH1’s first hourlong scripted drama and an explicitly lifted homage, a boutique owner presents an ultimatum to her hot-ticket boyfriend, a basketball player whose wingspan doesn’t suggest someone keen to negotiate. And so begin the one-night stands, screaming matches, freedom affirmations, back-seat seductions and enraged exits of this largely absurdist but not entirely useless almost-postracial soap.

Part of the show’s fantasy is that dating is the last frontier of discrimination. Set in an Atlanta of high-salaried bank shots, tight jersey dresses and the art form formerly known as the music video, “Single Ladies” has been produced by Queen Latifah and explores the lives of a group of friends — Carrie, Samantha, no, I mean to say, Val, Keisha and April — as they navigate the sexual politics of a city where, we’re told, there is one man for every 12 marriage-minded women. Keisha (LisaRaye McCoy), who along with Val (Stacey Dash) is black, manages the Darwinian terrain by keeping her sights set on a big-money partner and never becoming too attached. She doesn’t dare try online dating, as one male friend observes, because she can’t put “gold digger” in her profile.

That the term is meant affectionately, or at least not derisively, says something about the shame and distaste that white girl culture still maintains around the notion of women who pursue men for money. “Sex and the City” landed three of its four central characters with wealthy men as if by virtue of accident or entitlement but certainly not agenda. Of course in the real world, full of people for whom Jane Austen values are not necessarily paradigm, it is rarely the purest of heart who wind up with the place in Palm Beach.

Rather than soliciting your judgment of a money chaser, the show invites it for April (Charity Shea), a dimwitted white woman with no clear goals of any kind. April has a devoted black husband who offers to rent a villa for her in the Mediterranean when the inkling of a bad mood sets in. But April is also carrying on with the city’s black mayor, a hound of a guy who seems to be getting busy with half the neighborhood of Buckhead. She has no explanation for her affair other than a vague sense of boredom, and her black friends resent the lack of racial solidarity the men in her life display by having fallen for her.

Out for dinner with a handsome black guy she meets online, Val is bidden to anger when she learns that he usually goes out only with white women, whose hair and manner he tends to find less objectionable. “Single Ladies” has issues with black men, who are depicted as way too self-regarding, and blond women, who are simply taking up too much space on the planet. Not altogether predictably, the show reserves a certain kindness for that forgotten minority: the boyish white man. Apparently “Single Ladies” has yet to see “The Hangover Part II.”

SINGLE LADIES

VH1, Monday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Produced by Flavor Unit Entertainment, POPfilms and VH1. Created and written by Stacy A. Littlejohn; directed by Tamra Davis; Queen Latifah, Shakim Compere, Shelby Stone, Maggie Malina, Alex A. Motlagh, Ms. Littlejohn, Ms. Davis, Jill Holmes and Jeff Olde, executive producers.

WITH: Stacey Dash (Val), LisaRaye McCoy (Keisha), Charity Shea (April), Kassandra Clementi (Christina) and D B Woodside (Malcolm).