ORIGINAL CYN

Low-wattage Bridget Jones knock-off about a young Irishwoman who finds love and professional advancement once she breaks a few rules.

Dubliner Cyn Fishbein is too nice for her own good. Thirty-two and single, she works as a junior copywriter at a “cutting edge” ad agency and hangs out with her pals: Hugh, a gay would-be writer from a posh but moneyless family, and Harmony, a former model and wildly successful hair-stylist worried about turning 40 without a child. Cyn is also still close to her typically eccentric but lovable family, as interminable pages of visits home attest. Despite a full recovery, her mother’s bout with cancer when Cyn and her brother were kids has scarred Cyn by making her too eager to please—as Cyn’s therapy group leader Veronica has told her many times. Then Cyn discovers that her co-worker and main competition for a senior copywriting position, Chelsea Roggenfelder, is out to get her. First, Chelsea, the daughter of an American advertising mogul, maneuvers Cyn into driving a car plastered with advertisements for a hemorrhoid ointment. Then Chelsea steals Cyn’s brilliant idea for a major ad campaign for a new low-fat doughnut. When Chelsea ends up hospitalized after a yoga accident, Cyn finds herself breaking a few rules as she impersonates Chelsea with the doughnut people in order to prove that she, not Chelsea, came up with the campaign. Meanwhile, a handsome new stranger named Joe has joined Cyn’s therapy group, and soon Joe and she are breaking Veronica’s big rule by fraternizing outside of the group. Their romance, complete with surprisingly graphic sex, hits a snag when Cyn discovers Joe joined the therapy group under false pretenses. And her own false pretenses with the doughnut people almost get her into trouble at work.

Tepid sitcom from the prolific Margolis (Apocalipstick, 2003, etc). Not one of her best.