Jake Winters (David Duchovny) places an ad in the newspaper under "Red Shoes", seeking women to mail in their personal diaries with stories of love, passion and/or betrayal.

Zalman King conceived of an erotic television series that would air on premium cable, which was then a burgeoning market as it was not beholden to MPAA ratings.

[1] With his wife and collaborator Patricia Louisianna Knop, King wrote the script for the television film Red Shoe Diaries, intending it to be the pilot for the anthology series.

"[5] He dismissed the term softcore to categorize his work because of its pornographic connotations, saying, "Eroticism has a real place in my vocabulary because [it] usually needs to move out of a relationship or some sort of tension and that's what I'm very interested in.

"[5] Lizzie Borden, Anne Goursaud, Mary Lambert, Nelly Alard, and Elise D'Haene were among the female writers and directors on the show.

Though the series did not gain positive attention from critics,[10][11][12] it was a major success for Showtime and helped boost the network's viewership to compete with HBO in the 1990s.

[13][5] Imitators and softcore series similarly aimed at female audiences sprang up in the wake of the show's popularity, including The Hunger,[14] Emmanuelle in Space,[14] Women: Stories of Passion,[13] and Strangers.

[15][16] TV critics described the series as "both creator of 'art house' soft porn and savior of the kind of quality programming for which pay cable has also become known", and "innovative for its time...[for staying] true to its basic, lusty principles while adding music-video artiness, jumpy, nervy video cuts and dim mood lighting for a veneer of upscale, almost snooty, erotica.